Conservation and Restoration of Ecosystem Services for Promoting Biodiversity: A Critical Zone perspective to Compare Italy and Taiwan Mountain Study Sites

Abstract

This highly interdisciplinary proposal aims at exchanging and improving knowledge about ecosystem services (ES) restoration, for promoting biodiversity conservation in Italy and in Taiwan sites by adopting the perspective of critical zone (CZ) processes, involved in the terrestrial ecosystems functioning (Richter and Billings, 2015). The welfare and living quality of humans depend on the uninterrupted provision of ecosystem services. However, natural ecosystems are constantly threatened by ongoing climate change and anthropogenic impacts; so assessing their resilience to adverse conditions is essential to mitigate the negative impacts and to promote biodiversity recovery and protection (Pörtner et al., 2022).

In Europe, high-altitude environments are particularly exposed to climate change, owing for instance to faster rise in temperatures compared to lowlands, plant migration upwards, land use (LU) change, glacier retreat, increase of summer droughts and decrease of snow cover. These phenomena exacerbate water stress conditions and shorten the growing and reproductive period of plants and animals, as well as soil microbial activity, finally inducing relevant ecological changes with cascading effects. At present, the processes dominating high-altitudes ecosystems responses to exogenous shocks are still unclear. These areas are rich in biodiversity, offering a great variety of habitats and microclimates, biological and cultural diversity. On the one hand, this richness is an advantage in terms of biodiversity, owing to the variety of ecological, socioeconomic and cultural services that mountain ecosystems can provide, such as regulating water supply and quality, energy production, improving resilience and sustainability, contributing to food chains through grazing and crop production, and offering recreational services and options for tourism. On the other hand, it makes it complicated to understand the underlying CZ processes and the multiple and interrelated strategies that ecosystems adopt to mitigate climate change (Lembrechts et al., 2019).

In Asia low-altitude mountains are the most disturbed environment (Peng and Wang, 2019; Arfanuzzaman and Dahiya, 2019), as urbanization continues to sprawl towards this region which coincides with important watershed areas and extracts a massive amount of natural resources. Anthropogenic impact on ES degradation (McDonald et al., 2013) is manifested in different LU changes, such as dam or tunnel construction, water transfer project, town building, tourist activities and monoculture of economic crops via intensive farming activity with heavy use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides to increase agricultural yield and improve income for farmers. In this context, the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (Secretariat IPSI, 2018) fosters development in harmony with nature by conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services for human well-being. Most of the successful cases occur in low altitude mountain areas where agro-biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources are promoted with innovative nature based solutions (Kozar et al., 2019).

The main goal of this Italy-Taiwan collaboration proposal is to promote a long-term partnership to compare the evolving dynamics of two different mountain ecosystems located in Europe and Asia and influenced by external forcings of different intensities (human activities and/or climatic impact). In particular, through cross-country studies, we aim to evaluate how these communities are adapting to climate change and to identify different mitigation strategies to enhance their resilience, adopting a CZ perspective to link natural and social scientists. The final aim is to co-investigate the systematic change or causes of ES degradation in mountain communities and to co-produce innovative solutions and policy recommendations to local authority and community. In other words, this implies the ability to combine multiple disciplinary perspectives and cross-fertilise them, with also the contribution of non-scientist stakeholders and local actors (Scholz, Steiner, 2015a, 2015b).