Land use management to ensure ecosystem service delivery under new societal and environmental pressures in heathlands

The combined impact of climate and land-use change poses increasing threats to nature and nature's benefit to people. LandPress studies how climate and land-use change affects biodiversity and natural resources in Norwegian coastal heathlands. Cessation or reduction of agricultural land-use leads to overgrowth and loss of habitats, biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services. Such changes negatively impact a variety of habitats, many of which are classified as threatened across Norway and Europe. When overgrowth occurs in combination with climate change, problems accentuate. Extreme weather, in the form of droughts, in combination with overgrowth increases landscape fire risk. Uncontrolled wildfires constitute a societal cost, both in terms of firefighting, replacement of lost values, and human safety. Active agriculture can therefore have social value beyond food production through producing ecosystem services such as reduced wildfire risk. In 2014 an intense winter drought led to massive heather death along the Norwegian coast. LandPress uses this "natural experiment" in observational studies and field experiments. Through interpretation of aerial photos, we investigate the extent of the drought damage in 2014, and especially to what extent different heathland habitat types, parts of the landscape, and land-use regimes are more resistant to drought damage than others. We find varying degrees of drought damage, where both topographical factors, wind, and heather age come into play. It turns out that old heather is less resistant to drought than young heather plants, and we are therefore testing whether heather burning can be an effective measure to prevent drought damage. We do this with the help of a drought experiment performed in heather of different ages after fire, repeated at seven locations along the coast from Hordaland to Nordland. We find that burning of drought-damaged heather stimulates growth and regeneration, and burning can therefore be an effective tool for restoring plant growth and thus carbon storage in the system after a drought episode. A benefit cost analysis shows that coastal heath management can be socio-economically beneficial because the benefit value associated with reduced risk of drought damage and uncontrolled landscape fires exceeds the cost of management. In a larger context, we look at how agriculture produces ecosystem services for the benefit of society, with particular emphasis on reduced fire risk. The project will provide new knowledge-based management advice, which in turn could help reduce the likelihood of uncontrolled fires in a coastal landscape and changing climate. The project's international collaboration places our findings in a larger context across geographical regions and habitat types. LandPress has contributed to the debate on the values of the coastal heath as a habitat type and as a provider of ecosystem services, both through scientific articles, lectures, popular science articles and newspaper articles. We have also contributed to the debate and method development for the professional system for good ecological status, and disseminated knowledge about coastal heath, fire, wild sheep and research more generally on EKKO, NRK. The project was led by the University of Bergen in collaboration with Møreforsking, the Norwegian Institute for Bioeconomics, Statistics Norway, the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research, the University of Copenhagen and Ohio State University. The project has had a reference group consisting of people from administration, industry and research.

Effekter: LandPress bidrar med ny kunnskap og økt kompetanse om arealbruk og klimapåvirkning på biologisk mangfold og økosystemtjenester i kystlyngheia. Vi har fått ny kunnskap om årsakene til lyngdød, og om hvordan vi ved hjelp av skjøtsel kan øke lyngheienes mostandskraft mot ektrem tørke. Vi dokumenterer videre at brenning kan være et effektiv restaureringsverktøy for tørkeskadd lyng. Virkninger: LandPress muliggjør et bredere perspektiv på forvaltning og skjøtsel av kystlyngheiene våre. Gjennom å tilpasse skjøtselsregimet kan vi gjøre kystlyngheiene mer motstadsyktige mot klimendringer og ekstremvær, og vi kan restaurerer tørkesskadd lynghei. Vi dokumenter at skøtsel og restaurering av kystlynghei kan være samfunnsøkonomisk lønnsomt fordi nytteverdien av redusert brannrisiko, verdifull natur og miljøvennlig mat oppveier kostnadene ved skjøtsel av lyngheia.

LandPress is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on a major driver of land-use change: abandonment of traditional land-use practices such as grazing and prescribed burning, and explores how this interacts with climate change to cause significant ecological and societal changes. Marginalization and abandonment of land strongly affects ecosystems, causing large-scale successional changes and loss of habitats and ecosystem functions and services. As a result, several nature types are now classified as threatened in Norway and the EU. In addition to biodiversity and habitat loss, these changes also have negative societal impacts. A recent example is the increased risk of wildfires resulting from biomass build-up in successional landscapes, representing societal costs related to fire control, mitigation of landscape fires, compensation for economic losses, and loss of safety. This illustrates how land-use can provide values beyond food production, offering new motivation for land management as part of a green restructuring. The role of land-use in ecosystem service provisioning may be especially relevant under future climate, where extreme climatic events are predicted to increase in frequency. LandPress makes use of a rare opportunity, a 'natural experiment' created by extreme drought in the winter of 2014 that caused massive heather dieback as well as consecutive landscape fires along the Norwegian coast. The project combines observational data on ecosystem responses and resilience after the 2014 event with targeted experiments, one of them the International Drought Experiment, integrating our project into an international context. LandPress interlaces five work packages, exploring the impact of land-use change in combination with extreme climatic events in terms of vegetation change, ecosystem resilience, ecosystem services provisioning, sustainability, and evidence-based management and fire-risk prevention.