Trade-offs between maintenance of ecosystem services and socio-economic development in rural mountainous communities in southern Spain: A dynamic simulation approach

•We develop a dynamic model to explain trade-offs associated with land use changes.•We assess the impact of land use change on groundwater, aesthetic value and economy.•We focus on mountain rural communities in Southern Spain.•Land use intensification increased revenues but did not halt population decline.•Land use change led to groundwater depletion and loss of cultural landscapes.

Mountainous rural communities have traditionally managed their land extensively, resulting in land uses that provide important ecosystem services for both rural and urban areas. Over recent decades, these communities have undergone drastic changes in economic structure, population size and land use. Our understanding of the exact mechanisms that drive these changes is limited, and there is also a lack of integrative approaches to enable decision makers to steer rural development towards a more sustainable path. In this study, we build a dynamic simulation model to calculate the trade-offs between the provisions of two ecosystem services – landscape aesthetic value and water supply for human use – and the economic development associated with different land use changes. The study area for the simulation comprises two rural communities located in southern Spain. Our results show trade-offs between economic development and the provision of the selected ecosystem services in the selected study area. Land use intensification results in economic development but is not enough to prevent population loss and has a negative impact on both the water supply and on aesthetic services. We conclude that more proactive management policies are needed to mitigate a loss in ecosystem services. Simulation models like ours may facilitate the choice of these policies, as they could test the result of land use planning policies contributing therefore, to a more integrative and sustainable management of rural communities.