Future trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services in Mediterranean forests under global change scenarios

Mediterranean forests play a key role in providing services and goods to society, and are currently threatened by global change. We assessed the future provision of ecosystem services by Mediterranean pine forests under a set of management and climate change scenarios, built by combining different regional policies and climate change assumptions. We used the process-based model SORTIE-ND to simulate forest dynamics under each scenario. We coupled the outputs of SORTIE-ND with empirical and process-based models to estimate changes in harvested timber, carbon storage, mushroom yield, water provision, soil erosion mitigation and habitat for biodiversity by 2100, and assessed the trade-offs and synergies between services. Our results suggest that future provision of ecosystem services by Mediterranean forests will be more strongly determined by management policies than by climate. However, no management policy maximized the provision of all services. The continuation of the business-as-usual management would benefit some services to the detriment of water provision, but leads to higher vulnerability to extreme drought-events or wildfires. Managing for reducing forest vulnerability will balance the provision of services while reducing the risk of damage to forest functioning. We also found multiple spatial synergies between ecosystem services provision, likely driven by differences in site productivity.

This work was supported by the Spanish Government through the INMODES project (grant number: CGL2017-89999-C2-2-R), the ERA-NET FORESTERRA project INFORMED (grant number: 29183), the ERANET-SUMFORESTS project FutureBioEcon (PCIN-2017-052), and the Generalitat de Catalunya (CERCA Program). AMO, AA and MC were supported by Spanish Government through Juan de la Cierva and Ramón y Cajal fellowship programs (IJCI-2016-30349, IJCI-2016-30049 and RYC-2012-11109 respectively). SdM benefited from a Serra-Húnter Fellowship provided by the Generalitat de Catalunya.