Bertsch-Hoermann Bastian, Egger Claudine, Gaube Veronika, Gingrich Simone
Institute of Social Ecology (SEC), Department of Economics and Social Sciences (WiSo), University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), Schottenfeldgasse 29, 1070 Vienna, Austria.
Reg Environ Change. 2021;21(3):77. doi: 10.1007/s10113-021-01794-y. Epub 2021 Jul 21.
Mountain agroecosystems deliver essential ecosystem services to society but are prone to climate change as well as socio-economic pressures, making multi-functional land systems increasingly central to sustainable mountain land use policy. Agroforestry, the combination of woody vegetation with crops and/or livestock, is expected to simultaneously increase provisioning and regulating ecosystem services, but knowledge gaps concerning trade-offs exist especially in temperate industrialized and alpine regions. Here, we quantify the aboveground carbon (C) dynamics of a hypothetical agroforestry implementation in the Austrian long-term socio-ecological research region from 2020 to 2050. We develop three land use scenarios to differentiate conventional agriculture from an immediate and a gradual agroforestry implementation, integrate data from three distinct models (Yield-SAFE, SECLAND, MIAMI), and advance the socio-ecological indicator framework Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) to assess trade-offs between biomass provision and carbon sequestration. Results indicate that agroforestry strongly decreases HANPP because of a reduction in biomass harvest by up to - 47% and a simultaneous increase in actual net primary production by up to 31%, with a large amount of carbon sequestered in perennial biomass by up to 3.4 t C ha yr. This shows that a hypothetical transition to agroforestry in the relieves the agroecosystem from human-induced pressure but results in significant trade-offs between biomass provision and carbon sequestration. We thus conclude that while harvest losses inhibit large-scale implementation in intensively used agricultural regions, agroforestry constitutes a valuable addition to sustainable land use policy, in particular when affecting extensive pastures and meadows in alpine landscapes.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10113-021-01794-y.
山区农业生态系统为社会提供重要的生态系统服务，但容易受到气候变化和社会经济压力的影响，这使得多功能土地系统在可持续山区土地利用政策中日益重要。农林业，即将木本植被与作物和/或牲畜相结合，有望同时增加供给和调节生态系统服务，但在权衡方面存在知识空白，特别是在温带工业化地区和高山地区。在此，我们量化了奥地利长期社会生态研究区域从2020年到2050年假设实施农林业后的地上碳（C）动态。我们制定了三种土地利用情景，以区分传统农业与立即和逐步实施农林业的情况，整合来自三个不同模型（Yield-SAFE、SECLAND、MIAMI）的数据，并推进社会生态指标框架人类对净初级生产的占用（HANPP），以评估生物量供应和碳固存之间的权衡。结果表明，由于生物量收获减少高达-47%，同时实际净初级生产增加高达31%，农林业使HANPP大幅下降，多年生生物量中固存的碳量高达3.4吨碳/公顷/年。这表明，在该地区假设向农林业的转变减轻了农业生态系统的人为压力，但在生物量供应和碳固存之间产生了重大权衡。因此，我们得出结论，虽然收获损失阻碍了在集约利用农业地区的大规模实施，但农林业是可持续土地利用政策的宝贵补充，特别是在影响高山景观中的粗放牧场和草地时。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s10113-021-01794-y获取的补充材料。
