Modelling the impact of timing of land use on biodiversity conservation for the decision support software ‘Ecopay’

Background/Question/Methods

Agricultural land use such as intensive mowing or grazing has severely reduced the breeding success of many grassland species in Europe which are now endangered. For example, mowing reduces grass height and thus nest protection and mowing machines may cause direct mortality of nests. In order to make agricultural land use in Europe more species-friendly, each year several billion Euros are spent on payments to compensate farmers for (costly) biodiversity-enhancing land use measures. To improve the cost-effectiveness of such payments, i.e., to maximize the ecological benefit for a given financial budget, decision support tools for optimizing land use patterns at a regional scale are urgently needed including the appropriate ecological models on which they can be based. Of great importance is when a land use measure is applied in relation to the reproduction period of the species and not only where. However, in contrast to the spatial allocation of land use measures, their temporal allocation has received much less attention due to the high complexity inherent to the problem. We developed an ecological model that it is able to quantify the ecological impact of the timing of land use and implemented it in the decision support software ‘Ecopay’ for the calculation of cost-effective spatiotemporal land use patterns at a regional scale.

Results/Conclusions

The ecological model is based on the calculation of a species specific habitat quality for reproduction depending on both the local abiotic conditions, and the type and timing of land use. Model validation demonstrates that it is general and flexible enough to capture a wide variety of species and land use measures in a common way but also detailed enough to sufficiently consider the differences among them. In particular, it is able to sensitively differentiate among the different timing of land use across a variety of species in a straightforward way. Thus, the ecological model fulfils the demands of optimization procedures and can be applied in the decision support software ‘Ecopay’. We demonstrate the usefulness of our ecological model on the example of grassland conservation in the German Federal State of Saxony. We show the results of cost-efficiency analyses for a selection of species and land use measures and derive suitable and unsuitable measures for grassland biodiversity conservation. The results indicate that considerable spatiotemporal land use heterogeneity is necessary to conserve species even with partly overlapping reproduction periods.