Landscape structure affects the provision of multiple ecosystem services

Abstract

Understanding how landscape structure, the composition and configuration of land use/land cover (LULC) types, affects the relative supply of ecosystem services (ES), is critical to improving landscape management. While there is a long history of studies on landscape composition, the importance of landscape configuration has only recently become apparent. To understand the role of landscape structure in the provision of multiple ES, we must understand how ES respond to different measures of both composition and configuration of LULC. We used a multivariate framework to quantify the role of landscape configuration and composition in the provision of ten ES in 130 municipalities in an agricultural region in Southern Québec. We identified the relative influence of composition and configuration in the provision of these ES using multiple regression, and on bundles of ES using canonical redundancy analysis. We found that both configuration and composition play a role in explaining variation in the supply of ES, but the relative contribution of composition and configuration varies significantly among ES. We also identified three distinct ES bundles (sets of ES that regularly appear together on the landscape) and found that each bundle was associated with a unique area in the landscape, that mapped to a gradient in the composition and configuration of forest and agricultural LULC. These results show that the distribution of ES on the landscape depends upon both the overall composition of LULC types and their configuration on the landscape. As ES become more widely used to steer land use decision-making, quantifying the roles of configuration and composition in the provision of ES bundles can improve landscape management by helping us understand when and where the spatial pattern of land cover is important for multiple services.