Land use management to ensure ecosystem service delivery under new societal and environmental pressures in heathlands

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2016

End date

12/31/2020

Budget

969,732 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The combined impact of climate and land-use change poses increasing threats to nature and nature's benefit to people. LandPress studies how climate and land-use change affects biodiversity and natural resources in Norwegian coastal heathlands. Cessation or reduction of agricultural land-use leads to overgrowth and loss of habitats, biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services. Such changes negatively impact a variety of habitats, many of which are classified as threatened across Norway and Europe. When overgrowth occurs in combination with climate change, problems accentuate. Extreme weather, in the form of droughts, in combination with overgrowth increases landscape fire risk. Uncontrolled wildfires constitute a societal cost, both in terms of firefighting, replacement of lost values, and human safety. Active agriculture can therefore have social value beyond food production through producing ecosystem services such as reduced wildfire risk. In 2014 an intense winter drought led to massive heather death along the Norwegian coast. LandPress uses this "natural experiment" in observational studies and field experiments. Through interpretation of aerial photos, we investigate the extent of the drought damage in 2014, and especially to what extent different heathland habitat types, parts of the landscape, and land-use regimes are more resistant to drought damage than others. We find varying degrees of drought damage, where both topographical factors, wind, and heather age come into play. It turns out that old heather is less resistant to drought than young heather plants, and we are therefore testing whether heather burning can be an effective measure to prevent drought damage. We do this with the help of a drought experiment performed in heather of different ages after fire, repeated at seven locations along the coast from Hordaland to Nordland. We find that burning of drought-damaged heather stimulates growth and regeneration, and burning can therefore be an effective tool for restoring plant growth and thus carbon storage in the system after a drought episode. A benefit cost analysis shows that coastal heath management can be socio-economically beneficial because the benefit value associated with reduced risk of drought damage and uncontrolled landscape fires exceeds the cost of management. In a larger context, we look at how agriculture produces ecosystem services for the benefit of society, with particular emphasis on reduced fire risk. The project will provide new knowledge-based management advice, which in turn could help reduce the likelihood of uncontrolled fires in a coastal landscape and changing climate. The project's international collaboration places our findings in a larger context across geographical regions and habitat types. LandPress has contributed to the debate on the values of the coastal heath as a habitat type and as a provider of ecosystem services, both through scientific articles, lectures, popular science articles and newspaper articles. We have also contributed to the debate and method development for the professional system for good ecological status, and disseminated knowledge about coastal heath, fire, wild sheep and research more generally on EKKO, NRK. The project was led by the University of Bergen in collaboration with Møreforsking, the Norwegian Institute for Bioeconomics, Statistics Norway, the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research, the University of Copenhagen and Ohio State University. The project has had a reference group consisting of people from administration, industry and research.