Subsidient: Jazz Kok / Wageningen University
Subsidy: 173.67
Today the world is afflicted by three major interlinked environmental issues: climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss. These issues are of global concern as they have put the world’s ecosystems under profound pressure leading to a decline in ecosystem services (e.g. clean drinking water, crop pollination) critical to human survival. Vegetation and its functional characteristics (e.g. leaf area, photosynthetic rate) play an important role in ecosystem functioning, however, its application to degraded managed landscapes has been limited. Especially in this type of landscape it is important we understand how these mechanisms work to be able to design informed restoration strategies. The goal of this study was to fill this knowledge gap by assessing the role of plant functional traits in the supply of ecosystem services on degraded rangelands in Lesotho. Here people are primarily dependent on the wool and mohair industry for their income- hence restoring degraded rangelands is immensely important for Lesotho’s economy. To assess potential synergies and trade-offs I focused simultaneously on the following three ecosystem services: (1) climate regulation, (2) soil stability and (3) biodiversity.
I found that land management plays an important role in ecosystem service supply as generally management practices (fire, grazing, and tree cutting) are negatively associated with the different ecosystem services. In contrast, multi-stemmed herbs, species with a herringbone root topology, and native species are positively associated with soil stability, climate regulation, and biodiversity respectively. It is therefore possible to simultaneously improve the quality of the different ecosystem services by enhancing a species composition optimizing all three functional trait-strategies. These findings show that land management, vegetation type and plant functional traits are very important to the supply of ecosystem services.
