Sibyl Hanna Huber successfully finished her PhD dissertation on „Social-ecological modeling of Alpine ecosystem services“

The goals of the PhD project were to develop a social-ecological model that integrates ecosystem services supply and demand and to apply it to a mountain case study. The application should advance our understanding of global change impacts and disturbances on mountain social-ecological systems and help find alternative strategies which can maintain a desired level of ecosystem services.

The results of the thesis suggest that global change will increase the gap between a high demand for cultural services, including an aesthetic landscape, and a decreasing number of farmers who manage the landscape and the supply of services. However, in the shorter term, these services can be maintained against a range of pressures to a high degree. This will require several things: (1) a spatially explicit management of ecosystem services at the landscape scale, in which management is invested into services, that are sensitive to interventions and in regions, where demand for services is high, (2) early and cross-sectoral policy strategies, such as an improved cooperation between agricultural and spatial planning policies, and (3) the maintenance of the current farming structure, which comprises mostly part-time businesses and a highly subsidized agricultural sector.

The thesis also reveals that meeting the demand for cultural ecosystem services in the mountain case study in future is becoming increasingly difficult and will be related to high societal costs and trade-offs to demand for services at higher scales. Discussing longer-term perspectives the thesis contributes to the political and societal discourse on whether maintenance of the currently preferred (status quo) ecosystem services provision is efficient, sustainable and desirable and how to best enable transformative processes of mountain social-ecological systems.