Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Scenarios for providing multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity in viticultural landscapes

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Innovative research on the complex interaction of socio-economic and global environmental trends of biodiversity and ecosystem services is needed to help develop more informative scenarios for addressing environmental and human development challenges. To overcome these challenges coupled natural-human systems approaches and analyses are needed. These provide improved scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services that couple the outputs of direct and indirect drivers, such as land use, invasive species, overexploitation, biodiversity, environmental change, and pollution. The resulting models provide a methodological state-of-the art that results in more accurate quantitative assessments, better land use, and more effective ecosystem services. This research project involves a coalition of investigators dedicated to advancing sustainable ecosystem services and maintaining essential biodiversity in agricultural landscapes with a focus on issues in vinicultural systems. Drivers such as soil fertility, pest regulation, biodiversity conservation, and crop production as a function of climate change that influence land use, economics, and policy decisions at the local, landscape, and regional level will be examined. The interdisciplinary research team, which includes members from the US academic sector, will develop and test predictive models that examine and integrate different land use and biodiversity scenarios across spatial scales for future farm management in viticultural regions across Europe. Members of the team have extensive and well-documented collaborations with key stakeholders in the targeted regions including wine growers, non-governmental organizations, regional and national authorities, and extension service personnel. This research involves the iterative collection of input from stakeholders to help develop and test predictive models and to translate their results into a user-driven, decision-support tool that will provide wine-region vineyard farmers and regional authorities with better information and approaches on how to manage vinyards more sustainably and economically. Broader impacts of the work include international collaboration between the US, Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Romania, and The Netherlands. This large international collaboration will help build bridges collaboration and cooperation between countries and communities; engage stakeholders, ranging from local communities to national environmental protection agencies, in the process; and develop a far-reaching and rich, publicly accessible data resource that will be available to natural and social scientists across countries and disciplines. In addition to its scientific impact, this project has societal impacts in terms of the economies of an important cash crop which will likely also impacts on US winegrowing regions. Additional impacts include the integration of research and education and the training of a postdoctoral scholar. This award supports U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a coalition of 26 funding agencies from 23 countries through the Belmont Forum call for proposals on "Scenarios of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services". The call was a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that contribute to the development of scenarios, models, and decision-support tools for understanding and solving critical issues facing our planet. The goal of the competition was to improve and apply participatory scenario methods to enhance research relevance and its acceptance and to address gaps in methods for modelling impact drivers and policy interventions. It was also to develop and communicate levels of uncertainty associated with the models, to improve data accessibility and fill gaps in knowledge. Funds support U.S. participants in the larger international consortium are dedicated to synthesizing pest-control data using government-sponsored databases from Spain, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, and Romania. The data will be used to develop statistical models that predict variation in pest and predator abundances across European vineyards. These models will be validated against independent field measurements, collected by European colleagues, of arthropod biodiversity, pest control, and economic performance along gradients of landscape complexity and management options across five case-study regions. Results of the study will advance understanding of the consequences of various ecosystem services that try to address pressing challenges such as climate change, decline in worldwide biodiversity, invasive species, and unsustainable land use. Essential information from those intimately involved in vinicultural processes and land management will be collected via local focus groups which will generate stakeholder-driven scenarios. These case studies will be used to drive models that will be created and used to examine the most effective way of providing sustainable use. The validated models will be used to explore the biodiversity, ecosystem service, and crop production consequences of alternative land-use decisions under a range of social, economic and ecological restrictions. Collaborators from other countries are funded through their associated national funding organizations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.