Conference in Tartu, Estonia

A recording of my talk can be found here. I am the second speaker in this recording.

This my abstract of my oral presentation “Long-term provision of ecological and socio-economic functions through simulation-informed landscape design” in Tartu (Estonia):

Land use changes have dramatically transformed many tropical landscapes from forest to agriculturally dominated landscapes. Agricultural land uses, such as rubber and oil palm plantations, increase the socio-economic benefit at the cost of reduced ecological functioning, so called trade-offs. Questions emerge regarding the optimal design of landscapes, specifically regarding the fragmentation and connectivity of land cover types, aimed at mitigating such trade-offs. Given the fluctuating socio-economic benefits due to variable crop market prices, assessing the long-term effectiveness of these landscape designs in mitigating trade-offs becomes imperative. To tackle these knowledge gaps, we developed the ecological-economic land-use change model EFForTS-ABM that follows a combined agent- and grid-based approach. The model simulates the impact of land use change decisions made by smallholder farmers on the economic outcomes from oil palm and rubber plantations as well as ecological functions such as carbon sequestration. EFForTS-ABM is based on socio-economic and ecological field data from Sumatra (Indonesia). Using EFForTS-ABM we ran model scenarios on different landscape designs (i.e., different landscape fragmentations) and different crop price scenarios (i.e., constant vs different fluctuations of prices for rubber and palm oil). We then assessed landscape-level ecological and socio-economic functions as well as trade-offs among them over the simulation time. Here, we will demonstrate the usefulness of ecological-economic models such as EFForTS-ABM to assess the effect of different landscape designs and price scenarios on socio-economic and ecological functions as well as trade-offs among them. We will show that individual ecological functions are affected differently by changes in landscape fragmentation, leading to different trade-offs with socio-economic functions. In addition, temporal changes of land use and plantation ages driven by crop prices changed trade-offs over time. The results are an important basis for identifying landscape designs that minimize losses in ecological functions while still allowing for economic benefits in the long-term.