A framework to assess landscape structural capacity to provide regulating ecosystem services in West Africa

Justice Nana Inkoom; Susanne Frank; Klaus Greve; Christine Fürst

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.12.027

A framework to assess landscape structural capacity to provide regulating ecosystem services in West Africa

J Environ Manage. 2018 Mar 1:209:393-408. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.12.027.

Authors

Justice Nana Inkoom¹, Susanne Frank², Klaus Greve³, Christine Fürst⁴

Affiliations

¹ Center for Development Research (ZEF), Department of Ecology and Natural Resources Management, University of Bonn, Walter-Flex Strasse 3, 53113, Bonn, Germany; Geographisches Institut der Universitaet Bonn, Postfach 1147, D-53001, Bonn, Germany; Institute for Geosciences and Geography, Department Sustainable Landscape Development, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Von-Seckendorff-Platz 4, 06120, Halle, Germany. Electronic address: j.inkoom@uni-bonn.de.
² GICON Großmann Ingenieur Consult GmbH, Tiergartenstraße 48, 01219, Dresden, Germany.
³ Geographisches Institut der Universitaet Bonn, Postfach 1147, D-53001, Bonn, Germany.
⁴ Institute for Geosciences and Geography, Department Sustainable Landscape Development, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Von-Seckendorff-Platz 4, 06120, Halle, Germany.

PMID: 29309964
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.12.027

Abstract

The Sudanian savanna landscapes of West Africa are amongst the world's most vulnerable areas to climate change impacts. Inappropriate land use and agriculture management practices continuously impede the capacity of agricultural landscapes to provide ecosystem services (ES). Given the absence of practical assessment techniques to evaluate the landscape's capacity to provide regulating ES in this region, the goal of this paper is to propose an integrative assessment framework which combines remote sensing, geographic information systems, expert weighting and landscape metrics-based assessment. We utilized Analytical Hierarchical Process and Likert scale for the expert weighting of landscape capacity. In total, 56 experts from several land use and landscape management related departments participated in the assessment. Further, we adapted the hemeroby concept to define areas of naturalness while landscape metrics including Patch Density, Shannon's Diversity, and Shape Index were utilized for structural assessment. Lastly, we tested the reliability of expert weighting using certainty measurement rated by experts themselves. Our study focused on four regulating ES including flood control, pest and disease control, climate control, and wind erosion control. Our assessment framework was tested on four selected sites in the Vea catchment area of Ghana. The outcome of our study revealed that highly heterogeneous landscapes have a higher capacity to provide pest and disease control, while less heterogeneous landscapes have a higher potential to provide climate control. Further, we could show that the potential capacities to provide ecosystem services are underestimated by 15% if landscape structural aspects assessed through landscape metrics are not considered. We conclude that the combination of adapted land use and an optimized land use pattern could contribute considerably to lower climate change impacts in West African agricultural landscapes.

Keywords: Analytical hierarchical process; Expert weighting; GISCAME; Landscape configuration; Landscape metrics; Regulating ecosystem services.

MeSH terms

Agriculture
Climate Change*
Conservation of Natural Resources*
Ecosystem*
Ghana
Reproducibility of Results