Assessing Regional-Scale Impacts of Short Rotation Coppices on Ecosystem Services by Modeling Land-Use Decisions

Abstract

Meeting the world’s growing energy demand through bioenergy production involves extensive land-use change which could have severe environmental and social impacts. Second generation bioenergy feedstocks offer a possible solution to this problem. They have the potential to reduce land-use conflicts between food and bioenergy production as they can be grown on low quality land not suitable for food production. However, a comprehensive impact assessment that considers multiple ecosystem services (ESS) and biodiversity is needed to identify the environmentally best feedstock option, as trade-offs are inherent. In this study, we simulate the spatial distribution of short rotation coppices (SRCs) in the landscape of the Mulde watershed in Central Germany by modeling profit-maximizing farmers under different economic and policy-driven scenarios using a spatially explicit economic simulation model. This allows to derive general insights and a mechanistic understanding of regional-scale impacts on multiple ESS in the absence of large-scale implementation. The modeled distribution of SRCs, required to meet the regional demand of combined heat and power (CHP) plants for solid biomass, had little or no effect on the provided ESS. In the policy-driven scenario, placing SRCs on low or high quality soils to provide ecological focus areas, as required within the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, had little effect on ESS. Only a substantial increase in the SRC production area, beyond the regional demand of CHP plants, had a relevant effect, namely a negative impact on food production as well as a positive impact on biodiversity and regulating ESS. Beneficial impacts occurred for single ESS. However, the number of sites with balanced ESS supply hardly increased due to larger shares of SRCs in the landscape. Regression analyses showed that the occurrence of sites with balanced ESS supply was more strongly driven by biophysical factors than by the SRC share in the landscape. This indicates that SRCs negligibly affect trade-offs between individual ESS. Coupling spatially explicit economic simulation models with environmental and ESS assessment models can contribute to a comprehensive impact assessment of bioenergy feedstocks that have not yet been planted.

Unpacking ecosystem service bundles: Towards predictive mapping of synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem services

“…Land-use change is a management intervention that can drive demand and supply in one or more ES (Bennett et al 2009), and therefore land use/land cover (LULC) has been considered as a determinant of individual ES or ES bundles in this study and many others (e.g. Hamann et al 2015;Meacham et al 2016;Schulze et al 2016). There are several issues with using LULC as a determinant in multi-ES analyses.…”

“…Studies are increasingly applying these techniques in ES research to determine how drivers and ES are related to one another, by replacing the latter table with a site × ES table(Mouchet et al 2014;Meacham et al 2016), including, for example, redundancy analysis and canonical correspondence analysis. Other approaches have used regression-based or machine-learning methods with a single response variable, such as ES bundle type (e.g Hamann et al 2015;Meacham et al 2016;Schulze et al 2016),. or whether a locality represents a win-win or not(Qui & Turner et al 2013).Whichever quantitative method is used, a critical step is the identification of candidate socialecological variables that are important in explaining or predicting different ES bundles.…”

Biomass production and characteristics of short rotation plantations of clones of Gmelina arborea in three spacings

“…SRWC assume great significance because these are systems wherein fast growing tree species are cultivated under intensive agricultural practices in order to achieve high biomass yield (Pleguezuelo et al, 2015). The SRWC had assumed importance in some countries of the European Union (Schulze et al, 2016) and in the United States (Djomo et al, 2015). SRWC has also elicited an increasing amount of attention in Chile (Carmona et al, 2015), Brazil as well as in some Central American countries (Cutz, et al, 2016;Salazar-Zeledón et al, 2015).…”

Multifunctionality of Forests: A White Paper on Challenges and Opportunities in China and Germany

“…Even the old coppice systems, which were mostly abandoned in Middle Europe during the 19th century, are reinvented as short-rotation plantations on agricultural land as a means of climate change mitigation. The multifunctional evaluation of the different options is rather complex [16] and is dependent on system boundaries. Deckmyn et al [17] compared the benefits for carbon sequestration of afforestation with an oak-beech high forest with a poplar short-rotation coppice.…”