Assessing the impacts of economic and climate changes on land-use in mountain regions: A spatial dynamic modeling approach

Future land-use changes are predicted to be influenced by both climate-driven environmental changes and concomitant changes in local economic conditions. Assessing the impact of climate change on ecosystems, and the goods and services that they provide, therefore requires an understanding of the dynamic link between land-cover, ecosystem services and economic-driven land-use decisions. The economic land allocation model (ALUAM) simulates the competition between forest and a range of agricultural land-uses to estimate land-use conversions in a spatially explicit manner at high resolution. Using a modular framework, ALUAM was linked with the forest-landscape model LandClim, and a crop yield model, that simulate the response of forests and crops to changes in climate. An iterative data exchange between the models allows a detailed assessment of the dynamic changes in the provision of agricultural and forest based services. We apply our model to the temperature sensitive inner-alpine region of Visp, Switzerland. Our results demonstrate that land-use is influenced directly by environmental shifts and economic decisions, but are also highly dependent on the interactions between these two components. These shifts in land-use will correspondingly affect the provision of ecosystem goods such as food and timber production.