LUBIO - Land Use, climate change and BIOdiversity in cultural landscapes (LUBIO):Assessing feedbacks and promoting land‐use strategies towards a viable future

Land-use and climate change are important, pervasive drivers of global environmental change and pose major threats to global biodiversity. Climate change will not only alter the pool of plant and animal species capable of thriving in a specific area, it will also force land owners to re-consider their land use decisions. Such changes in land-use practices may have major additional effects on local and regional species composition and abundance. The LUBIO project focuses on the anticipated systemic feedbacks between (1) climate change, (2) land owner’s decisions on land use, (3) land-use change, and (4) changes in biodiversity patterns during the coming decades in a regional context which integrates a broad range of land use practices and intensity gradients. An integrated socioecological model is designed and implemented, consisting of three principal components: (1) an agent based model (ABM) that simulates decisions of important actors, (2) a spatially explicit GIS model that translates these decisions into changes in land cover and land use patterns, and (3) a species distribution model (SDM) that calculates changes in biodiversity patterns following from both changes in climate and the land-use decisions as simulated in the ABM. This model is used to generate scenarios of future land-use decisions of landowners under climate change and, eventually, the combined effects of climate and land use changes on biodiversity. Model development of the ABM is supported by a participatory process intended to collect regional and expert knowledge through a series of expert interviews, a series of transdisciplinary participatory modelling workshops, and a questionnaire-based survey targeted at regional farmers.