Mountain ecosystem in a changing world: land use, pollution and pathogens (MoLUP)

Land-use and climate change are pervasive drivers of global environmental change, posing major threats to global ecosystems and biodiversity. Research to date has mostly focused either on land-use change or on climate change, but rarely on the interactions between both drivers, even though it is expected that systemic feedbacks between changes in climate and land use will have important effects on ecosystems and biodiversity. Climate change will not only alter patterns of temperature, precipitation or species pools, it will also motivate land owners to reconsider their land use decisions.MoLUP will team up with the ongoing Belmont project “People, Pollution and Pathogens- Mountain ecosystems in a human-altered world” (P3,led by Dirk Schmeller UFZ), to explore anticipated systemic feedbacks between (1) climate change, (2) land owner’s decisions on land use, (3) land-use change, and (4) changes in ecosystems and biodiversity in the coming decades in mountain areas investigated in P3.Within MoLUP, parts of the integrated socioecological model designed and implemented in the ongoing LUBIO project (funded by ÖAW) will be implemented in one of the four P3 sites (Pyrenees) The following two of the three main components of the model developed in LUBIO will be implemented, (1) an agent based model (ABM) that simulates decisions of important actors, (2) a spatially explicit GIS model that translates these decisions into maps of changes in land cover and land use patternsIn addition to the integrated socioecological model a catalogue of recommended policy and stakeholder actions will be developed and included in the concept of Mountains as Sentinels of Change (MESC) developed within P³.