Consequences on biodiversity from the abandonment
of traditional land uses in mountainous areas

The project

One of the most important threats of biodiversity, on a global scale, is land use change with land abandonment being one of the main trajectories of land use cover change across Europe. Although transformation of natural ecosystems into semi-natural (e.g. pastures), cultivated or urbanized areas has been traditionally considered as one of the main threats of biodiversity, during the last two decades, abandonment of traditional land uses, such as grazing and small-scale cultivations, has been also reported to lead to significant habitat loss and subsequently have adverse impacts on biodiversity. Land use abandonment, especially on mountainous or low productivity areas, is a phenomenon that takes place worldwide and it constitutes the most predominant land use change in Europe. On one hand, land abandonment is considered as a unique chance “for restoring some of the lost biodiversity and ecosystem functions” in Europe, through a process called rewilding. On the other hand, a number of studies concludes that land use abandonment has negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functions or even comprise one of the most important biodiversity threats for specific species and habitats.

The main aim of the project is to address this issue and study the consequences of land use abandonment on the three main facets of vascular plant diversity (taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic) in the northwestern sub-mountainous region of the Pindus Mountains in Greece. This general aera was historically (i.e., before the 2nd World War) submitted to high levels of exploitation by means of traditional practices (e.g., small-scale farmlands, pastoralism), but during the last decades a great part these traditional land uses have been abandoned resulting in extensive changes in land cover. Moreover, we aim at understanding the trajectories of the landscape and diversity aspects under future climate and socioeconomic conditions by predicting changes of land cover and species distributions across our general study area. Finally, we investigate the importance of incorporation of land use change data for current and future conditions during conservation planning.

Specific Aims

The objectives of the proposed research are:

1) To document the land use/land cover changes in an area where land abandonment patterns have been already observed and/or documented.

2) To calculate the consequences of land abandonment on all the three main facets of diversity (taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic) and investigate their relation with important environmental factors, such as physiography, soil and climate.

3) To predict land use/land cover changes in the future, by taking into account both trends of socio-economic factors as well as climate change scenarios

4) To develop systematic conservation plans, on the basis of both present and future conditions, in order to conserve in the most comprehensive way all the three facets of diversity.

Originality

The project aims at applying a holistic and novel approach for the study of the consequences of land abandonment in plant diversity. It aims at the combination of different methods and different types of data to explore in depth the above-mentioned consequences. The research questions focus on the impact of LUA on biodiversity, a research topic for which the scientific community shows an increasing interest.

Land use and climate change are among the major threats of biodiversity, thus the prediction of their combined effect on biodiversity comprise a major challenge in conservation biology.
Integration of all diversity facets in the context of biodiversity understanding and conservation planning is crucial since each component is possible to be related with distinctive utilities, such as option value, resilience or maximizing ecosystem functioning.

GALLERY