Spatial complexity and ecosystem services in rural landscapes

Despite general agreement on antagonist relationships between ecosystems capacity to simultaneously sustain the availability of regulating services and agricultural production, it is not clear how these tradeoffs operate in response to complexity loss at the rural landscapes level. Here we present a novel evaluation framework of ecosystem services (ES) and pose different response models to landscape complexity. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that complementarities among different ES types increase and the strength of their apparent tradeoffs diminishes with the spatial complexity of the rural landscapes, using a one million has basin of the Argentine pampas as study case. According to correlation and principal component analysis, main ES tradeoffs among ES availability observed at two spatial scales were represented by crop production vs. the other evaluated ES types (OES), and in contrast with our prediction, their strength was not higher for the fine- than for the coarse-scale (relatively large and internally complex observation units). Landscape composition and configuration indices showed a complementary capacity to explain spatial variation in OES, but combinations of configuration indices showed a higher explanatory value than composition ones. Widely accepted tradeoffs among ecosystem services at local levels, not only were able to explain their antagonistic but also their synergistic availability at intermediate levels of conversion of managed grasslands to croplands, depending on the evaluation scale. Despite intermediate complexity hypothesis was only partly supported by our results, these offer novel evidences about emergent responses in the form of nonlinearities and thresholds of total ES in relation to landscape complexity, which deserve further attention because of their relevance for land use planning.

► We modeled the influence of spatial complexity on relevant ecosystem services (ES).
► Spatial variation in ES other than crop production was complementarily explained by landscape composition and configuration.
► Combinations of configuration indices showed higher explanatory value than composition ones.
► Both antagonistic and synergistic availabilities of overall ES were observed at intermediate complexity according to spatial scale.