Maintaining biodiversity promotes the multifunctionality of social-ecological systems: holistic modelling of a mountain system

Abstract Monitoring the provision of multiple ecosystem services (ES) in social-ecological systems is a major challenge. Most tools usually tackle the problem by modelling individual ES, but do not perform a holistic analysis of a dynamic and integrated system. We developed a discrete-event model (DORIAN) and explored its potential for assessing biodiversity and multifunctionality of a mountain ski resort subjected to a changing climate. We represented this social-ecological system as a network comprising 16 binary components and 51 processes that define component interactions. We identified 22 economy- and ecology-related ES, depending on the presence/absence of components. We simulated six scenarios representing different economic, environmental and climatic situations and calculated a score (the sum of proxies for biodiversity or ES), corresponding to the level of biodiversity and multifunctionality. Results showed that climate change reduced the system’s multifunctionality and increased the number of degraded states, as well as the trajectories from healthy to degraded states. With increasing levels of biodiversity, only ecology-related ES were boosted at low biodiversity levels, while both high levels of ecology- and economy-related ES were maintained at high biodiversity levels. This result demonstrates the importance of conserving high biodiversity in a social ecological system, for an optimal “biodiversity – multifunctionality” win-win strategy.