COS 18-6 - What is ecosystem multifunctionality?

Tuesday, August 9, 2016: 9:50 AM
124/125, Ft Lauderdale Convention Center
Peter Manning, Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Background/Question/Methods

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in ecosystem multifunctionality, which is defined as the provision of multiple ecosystem functions and services at high levels. To date, multifunctionality research has developed in two largely separate fields. The first seeks to understand whether biodiversity-functioning relationships are stronger when multiple functions are considered (biodiversity-function). The other aims to identify landscape management practices that minimize trade-offs between competing land use objectives (ecosystem services). While the former has developed quantitative measures of ecosystem multifunctionality I will argue here that these often have limited relevance to the landscape-scale multifunctionality that human societies demand. In contrast, landscape-scale ecosystem service studies often lack quantitative measures of multifunctionality, despite their potential to deliver a more robust and generalizable science of land use that could inform management decisions.

Results/Conclusions

Here I will discuss how merging and extending ideas from the biodiversity-function and ecosystem services fields can advance both sub-disciplines by providing definitions of ecosystem multifunctionality that are conceptually robust, quantifiable and societally relevant.  The methodological advances that emerge from this new framework include 1. The use of stakeholder derived weightings for ecosystem functions and services. 2. The use of indicator variables for bundles of associated ecosystem functions and 3. Landscape level measures of ecosystem multifunctionality that can be derived from the upscaling of plot level ecosystem function measures. These arguments will be illustrated with new and recently published empirical examples taken from large collaborative projects conducted in European forest and grassland ecosystems (e.g. FunDiv Europe and the German Biodiversity Exploratories).