Uncovering the ecosystem service legacies of wetland loss using high‐resolution models

What is it about?

Ecosystem services provided by contemporary landscapes are different from those of the past, and in our case study this change is a legacy of policies that incentivized wetland drainage without considering the impact on ecosystem services. We contrasted contemporary ecosystem services with a scenario of no wetland drainage in the Ruamahanga Basin, New Zealand, a region historically rich in wetlands. Using the Land Use Capability Indicator (LUCI) model, we mapped five ecosystem services: nitrogen retention, phosphorous retention, sediment retention, agricultural productivity, and flood mitigation at a 5‐m spatial resolution under these two scenarios. Our work supports the broad understanding that agricultural productivity has increased in contemporary landscapes, while flood mitigation and nutrient retention have decreased. Net losses in the number of ecosystem services occurred for the majority of historical wetlands. Spatially heterogeneous and divergent responses of ecosystem services to land cover changes reinforced the need for high‐resolution models to untangle the range of factors affecting ecosystem service provisioning. Initial conditions played an important role in determining ecosystem service outcomes, with losses of swamps being particularly problematic for net loss of ecosystem services provisioning, compared to losses of fens. The maps we produced, and the algorithms underlying them, provide tools to envision both local‐ and broad‐scale effects of historical wetland drainage.

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Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash

Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash