Modeling of Land Cover Change Impacts on Habitat Quality of a Forested Landscape in the Sarvelat and Javaherdasht

Authors

1 PhD student, Department of Environmental Planning, University of Tehran, Iran

2 Assoc. Prof. Department of Environmental Planning, University of Tehran

3 Prof. Department of Environmental Planning, University of Tehran

4 Assoc. Prof. Department of Agricultural Economics, Sari University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources

Abstract

Biodiversity as a supporting service of forest ecosystems is declining globally due to land conversion
and degradation in response to human needs for food production and settlements. To make informed
decisions, evaluation of change impacts under stakeholder-defined scenarios is considered to be an
appropriate method which considers the consequences of decline. While land use/cover change
modeling is an urgent need, it usually is faced with obstacles due to the methodological problems and
lack of explicit spatial data. In this paper, we applied two spatially explicit tools, The Scenario
Generator and The Habitat Quality from the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services
and Tradeoffs) suite of models, to project the future changes of the Sarvelat and Javaherdasht
mountain system in northern Iran, based on land suitability and stakeholder's interests. We also
explored the existing spatial patterns of habitat quality as a proxy for biodiversity and predicted its
changes in plausible future. In this regard, after quantification of land use/cover changes based on
predictive scenario, the degrees of land degradation and habitat quality under both current and future
situations were compared. The results showed that any changes outside of protected boundaries, can
impact habitat quality inside of the protected areas, as the new threat sources as well as external
driving forces of the change occure. Since, the ecosystem supporting services specifically the
biodiversity, is usually ignored in landscape planning due to its complex nature of the analysis, the
mapped quantified outputs of these models can effectively make easier for decision makers, to
understand the distribution patterns and existing richness of biodiversity across a landscape and make
compatible policies based on multiple ecosystem services capability.

Keywords