Thomas Koellner

University of Bayreuth · Department of Geosciences, Bayreuth Center of Ecology and Environmental Research (BayCEER)

Halting the loss of biodiversity while providing food security for a growing and prospering world population is a challenge. One possible solution to this dilemma is organic agriculture, which is expected to enhance biodiversity on the farmland. However, organic products often require larger areas. This study demonstrates how we can quantify and co...

Purpose As a consequence of the multi-functionality of land, the impact assessment of land use in Life Cycle Impact Assessment requires the modelling of several impact pathways covering biodiversity and ecosystem services. To provide consistency amongst these separate impact pathways, general principles for their modelling are provided in this pape...

Land use decisions result from complex deliberative processes and fundamentally influence the livelihoods of many. These decisions are made based on quantitatively measurable information like topography and on qualitative criteria such as personal preferences. Bayesian networks (BN) are able to integrate both quantitative and qualitative data and a...

Ecosystem services such as food provisioning, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, or recreation in open landscapes underpin human wellbeing. They are highly dependent on land use, land cover and utilization pattern as well as environmental factors like climate, topography and soil. In consequence, ecosystem services supply shows a high spatial va...

The agricultural management of grasslands not only is strongly linked to fodder production but also provides other valuable ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, nutrient regulation, and recreation. Capturing the values that society places on such ecosystem services is a step to provide management recommendations. To elicit the societal...

Climate and land‐use change are key drivers of environmental degradation in the Anthropocene, but too little is known about their interactive effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Long‐term data on biodiversity trends are currently lacking. Furthermore, previous ecological studies have rarely considered climate and land use in a joint des...

Micronutrient deficiencies are decisive drivers of malnutrition and persistence of illnesses globally. International food trade is increasingly shaping land and food systems, through virtual trade in land and water, but also through affecting food supply by redistribution of micronutrients. However, trade flows of micronutrients between countries h...

The Bavarian referendum Biodiversity and Natural Beauty (Volksbegehren Artenvielfalt) has led to significant changes in Bavarian environmental legislation. This article investigates and assesses the potential impact of the referendum on ecosystem services (ES) based on existing literature. For this purpose, we selected all the legislative changes t...

Multifunctional and resilient landscapes are necessary to ensure the provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). The benefits of small forest patches, hedgerows and shrubs are especially for biodiversity-mediated and for regulating ES well established. Subsequently, nature-based solutions such as agroforestry systems and landscape approaches are being...

Maintaining food security and environmental integrity over time requires a transition towards sustainable food systems. This paper analyzes different dimensions of national food supply sustainability on a global scale. By focusing on four food staples: wheat, rice, maize, and soybeans, the analysis identifies production regions that are more or les...

The integration of socio-cultural assessments in ecosystem services research has increased steadily over the last years. However, the stakeholders’ perception of ecosystem services from grasslands, a major agricultural land cover in (pre-)Alpine landscapes, has received only limited attention. Furthermore, studying the heterogeneity of perceptions...

Climate and land-use change are key drivers of environmental degradation in the Anthropocene, but too little is known about their interactive effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Long-term data on biodiversity trends are currently lacking. Furthermore, previous ecological studies have rarely considered climate and land use in a joint des...

Zusammenfassung Die in den letzten Jahrzehnten beobachtete Aufgabe der Almbewirtschaftung ist der größte Landnutzungswandel im Alpenraum und führt zu einem Verlust von Jahrhunderte bis Jahrtausende alter Kulturlandschaft mit ihren Bodenfunktionen, ihrer Artenvielfalt und ihrer touristischen Attraktivität. Die 1955 aufgelassene Brunnenkopfalm im Amm...

The monitoring of land cover and land use change is critical for assessing the provision of ecosystem services. One of the sources for long-term land cover change quantification is through the classification of historical and/or current maps. Little research has been done on historical maps using Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA). This study appli...

Despite a growing number of national-scale ecosystem service (ES) assessments, few studies consider the impacts of ES use and consumption beyond national or regional boundaries. Interregional ES flows-ecosystem services "imported" from and "exported" to other countries-are rarely analyzed and their importance for global sustainability is little kno...

Integrated model systems that simulate land use and land cover change (LUCC) and associated changes of ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly important for supporting policies and management decisions. However, only few model frameworks exist that consider policy options as drivers of future LUCC and ES simultaneously. We present a modeling proce...

Agri-environmental measures (AEM) are designed to encourage farmers to protect and enhance the environment on their farmland by paying them for the provision of environmental services. This study suggests that AEM would be more effective if payments were targeted to areas under the greatest environmental pressures, such as intensive agricultural re...

The volume of accessible geotagged crowdsourced photos has increased. Such data include spatial, temporal, and thematic information on recreation and outdoor activities, thus can be used to quantify the demand for cultural ecosystem services (CES). So far photo content has been analyzed based on user-labeled tags or the manual labeling of photos. B...

Trade of biomass as food, fodder, and fibres has long had a place in human history, and was theoretically underpinned by David Ricardo’s book The Principles of Trade and Taxation in 1817

From 18 to 20 September 2018, the SUSALPS Conference "Montane and alpine grasslands under climate change – ways in a sustainable future" was held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. More than 60 participants from nine nations attended the conference. The event covered a broad scope and offered the opportunity to discuss both fundamental research and practi-...

The globally increasing demand for food, fiber, and bio-based products interferes with the ability of arable soils to perform their multiple functions and support sustainable development. Sustainable soil management under high production conditions means that soil functions contribute to ecosystem services and biodiversity, natural and economic res...

Diversity of agricultural landscapes is important to maintain provision of ecosystem services. In face of decreasing support measures for agricultural markets in the European Union, diversified crop portfolios could also offer a possibility to stabilize revenue at farm level (portfolio effect). We hypothesize that (i) diversity of crop portfolios c...

http://conference2018.susalps.de

We introduce an explicit indicator and the Land Use Management Support System to assess the resource-use efficiency of land use (RUE) at the landscape scale. To estimate RUE, we relate land-use performance with regard to ecosystem services indicators to the maximum possible land-use performance based on an optimised land-use configuration. The test...

The drinking water quality along the Soyang watershed has been affected negatively by the intensive agricultural practices in the upstream area. Our study used a choice experiment method in order to estimate the values that the upstream water providers (i.e., farmers) and downstream water users (i.e., consumers) attach to the following attributes,...

Conserving and managing global natural capital requires an understanding of the complexity of flows of ecosystem services across geographic boundaries. Failing to understand and to incorporate these flows into national and international ecosystem assessments leads to incomplete and potentially skewed conclusions, impairing society’s ability to iden...

We derived spatially explicit erosion rates in kg of soil lost per kg of crop as. a function of crop choice and management practice on a global scale. These so-called characterization factors (CFs) can be used in product life cycle assessment studies to determine the impact of crop cultivation on soil erosion. We used the biophysical crop model EPI...

In South Korea, the Soyang Lake is an important source of drinking water to the metropolitan areas including Seoul. However, water quality problems in the Soyang Lake have still remained due to chemical contaminations attributed to conventional farming practices in the upstream areas. Based on a downstream consumer survey using a contingent valuati...

Integrated model systems that simulate land use and land cover change (LUCC) and associated changes of ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly important for supporting policies and management decisions. However, only few model frameworks exist that consider policy options as drivers of future LUCC and ES simultaneously. We present a modeling proce...

The Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework represents a significant advance in specifying the ecological constraints on human development. However, to enable decision-makers in business and public policy to respect these constraints in strategic planning, the PB framework needs to be developed to generate practical tools. With this objective in mind,...

We present options for a National Ecosystem Assessment in Germany (NEA-DE) that could inform decision-makers on the state and trends of ecosystems and ecosystem services. Characterizing a NEA-DE, we argue that its cross-sectoral, integrative approach would have the advantages of increased scientific understanding, addressing specific policy questio...

Biodiversity and nature’s benefits – our natural capital – are the pillars of our economy and well-being. Nature, along with human and manufactured capital, is an asset that provides us with essential services. The value of nature is often hidden from view because its services appear to be available for free in unlimited quantities. This is why, de...

The EU Biodiversity Strategy 2020 requires the Member States of the European Union to map and assess ecosystem services. This paper presents a procedure for developing a national framework of ecosystem service indicators for Germany that is applicable at different scales and is transferable to other countries. The framework was set up to use existi...

Temporal fluctuations of crop price and yield can have a strong influence on farmers' revenue. Under uncertainty, farmers' crop selection on – what to cultivate and how much of their land to allocate to different crops– is of crucial importance to secure their revenue as well as related ecosystem services. Multi-crop farming can be seen as a strate...

Does producing staple food locally cause fewer greenhouse gas emissions than food sourced through imports from another continent? To address this question we used a spatial optimization approach that minimized greenhouse gas emissions from production and transport of five food commodities (barley, maize, oil, sugar and wheat) and compared this to a...

While organic farming is well established in Europe and USA, it is still catching up in Asian countries. The government of South Korea has implemented environmentally friendly farming that encompasses organic farming. Despite the promotion of environmentally friendly farming, it still has a low share in South Korea and partially converted farming h...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have emerged as a popular conservation tool, yet evaluation alongside other direct conservation strategies remains piecemeal. We prospectively compared cost-effectiveness of PES to Land Purchases or Easements (LPE) in Central Kenya. We spatially predicted opportunity costs and land prices using household survey...

Remote sensing-based woody biomass quantification in sparsely-vegetated areas is often limited when using only common broadband vegetation indices as input data for correlation with ground-based measured biomass information. Red edge indices and texture attributes are often suggested as a means to overcome this issue. However, clear recommendations...

Existing global land use/land cover (LULC) raster maps have limited spatial and thematic resolution relative to the strong heterogeneity of agricultural landscapes. One promising approach to derive more informative maps is using fractional cover instead of hard classification. Here, we evaluate the effect of three key data processing options on the...

The Atlantic Forest is a global hotspot of biodiversity that may be on the verge of ecological collapse. Current changes in forest legislation have increased the debate concerning policy impacts on land-use and the consequences for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. This paper evaluates the impact of three environmental pol...

The worldwide demand for food has been increasing due to the rapidly growing global population, and agricultural lands have increased in extent to produce more food crops. The pattern of cropland varies among different regions depending on the traditional knowledge of farmers and availability of uncultivated land. Satellite images can be used to ma...

The worldwide demand for food has been increasing due to the rapidly growing global population, and agricultural lands have increased in extent to produce more food crops. The pattern of cropland varies among different regions depending on the traditional knowledge of farmers and availability of uncultivated land. Satellite images can be used to ma...

Table of Contents S1. Abbreviations and parameters S2. General LCA introduction S3. Z-values for use in Species-area relationships S4. Crop distribution and inventories for land and water use S5. Definition of taxa S6. Global species numbers and vulnerability S7. Ecoregions and major watersheds in Kenya S8. Global correlations S9. Fu...

temperatures in urban areas compared to their rural surroundings. UHIs grow and intensify under extreme hot periods, such as during heat waves, which can affect human health and also increase the demand for energy for cooling. This study applies remote sensing and land use/land cover (LULC) data to assess the cooling effect of varying urban vegetat...

Addressing biodiversity impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) has recently been significantly improved. Advances include the consideration of several taxa, consideration of vulnerability of species and ecosystems, global coverage and spatial differentiation. To allow a comparison of biodiversity impacts of different stressors (e.g. land and water...

Agricultural land use is a main driver of global biodiversity loss. The assessment of land use impacts in decision-support tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) requires spatially-explicit models, but existing approaches are either not spatially differentiated or modeled at very coarse scales (e.g. biomes or ecoregions). In this paper, we devel...

The introduction of fast-growing plant species has been a strategy worldwide to combat problems arising from land degradation. Prosopis juliflora is an ecosystem engineer that was introduced to Ethiopia in the 1970s to address erosion problems but has subsequently become an important invader. This paper analyzes the spread of P. juliflora in Baadu,...

During the past century, land use change, such as settlement development and intensification of agriculture, has led to a decreased capacity of natural floodplains to provide flood regulation across large areas of Europe. The expansion of built-up areas in flood zones has reduced retention areas, potentially leading to an increase of downstream flo...

Detailed data on land use and land cover constitute important information for Earth system models, environmental monitoring and ecosystem services research. Global land cover products are evolving rapidly; however, there is still a lack of information particularly for heterogeneous agricultural landscapes. We censused land use and land cover field...

Against the background of ongoing biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, there is a need for more conservation efforts at all governance levels that also take into account the needs of subnational governments, cities and other local authorities. This paper presents a rationale for including ecological indicators in intergovernmental fiscal tr...

Identifying patterns and drivers of regional land use changes is crucial for supporting land management and planning. Doing so for mountain ecosystems in East Asia, such as the So-yang River Basin in South Korea, has until now been a challenge because of extreme social and ecological complexities. Applying the techniques of geographic information s...