Spatiotemporally explicit prediction of future ecosystem service provisioning in response to climate change, sea level rise, and adaptation strategies

We present a framework to relate the provision of multiple, interacting ecosystem services to climate change and land use adaptation, by combining hydrological process models with statistical species’ distribution models and transfer functions to upscale plot data to the landscape scale. Functional traits of the projected plant communities predict provisional and species conservation services, whereas the hydrological model predicts water-related regulatory services. We applied the framework to coastal areas of the Baltic Sea to predict future ecosystem service outputs in yearly time steps from 2010 to 2100, based on a ‘high emissions’ climate change scenario, a projected sea-level rise of 1.05 m, and four land-management options corresponding to future coastal adaptation strategies. The “Hold the line” strategy implies continual pumping of excess rainwater into the sea to allow farm income from grassland usage, together with high conservation values for rare plants and meadow birds. Towards the end of the century, with an increasing sea-level rise, this results in reverse groundwater flows from sea to land and soil salinization of grasslands. Conversely, “managed realignment” implies the abandonment of pumping, thereby changing grasslands to reeds, reducing farm income and species conservation values, but promoting water retention and carbon sequestration by peat production. Between 2010 and 2100, the time series averaged across all landscape patches masked substantial spatial shifts in the outputs of ecosystem services from lower to higher elevations, emphasizing the relevance of considering both time and space. Multifunctional landscapes, by compromising between provisioning and regulatory ecosystem services, may create the response diversity needed to successfully adapt to climate change and sea-level rise.