Identifying Optimal Locations for Conservation Planning in the Canton of Bern under Uncertain Future Change

Robustness of Ecosystem Service Provision and Biodiversity under a Spectrum of Future Conditions

How to explore

Use the buttons above to select whether to display the robustness of ecosystem services, biodiversity metric or both combined. The map will update to show the performance and stability of that metric across all future scenarios. Hovering over the classes in the legend below will focus the map on only those classes and clicking on a class will temporaily focus the map to that class and display the total area (km²) of that class (clicking again on the same class or another class will reset the focus).

How to interpret
X-axis: Performance I Performance is calculated on a per-pixel basis as the mean of the cumulative sum of the change in ES and/or BD over all future time points for all scenarios. The use of the cumulative sum captures both positive and negative changes, thus a high value of Performance indicates that pixels generally display positive changes in ES and/or BD across all scenarios.

Low on the left, high on the right.

Y-axis: Stability I Stability is calculated using the Undesirable Deviation Metric, which sums the deviation (regret) away from the median value of the cumulative change in ES and/or BD for all instances below the median. In simple terms, it captures the extent of negative variation across scenarios, with higher values indicating greater variation.

Low at the bottom, high at the top.

Grey pixels are those that displayed low performance and low stability, while Dark Green were those that displayed high performance and high stability.

Gold indicates low performance but high stability, while blue indicates high performance but low stability.

Learn more about the methodology
Methodology

How robustness was assessed

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The maps of robustness were produced from simulations of the provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity between 2025 and 2060 under a wide range of future conditions. These future conditions including five scenarios of future land use change, five scenarios of economic development, three scenarios of demographic change, and three scenarios of climate change, resulting in a total of 225 unique future scenarios. Under these scenarios we simulated eight ecosystem services and the habitat suitability for Swiss National Priority Species (NPA) and species listed under the Swiss Environmental Objectives for Agriculture (UZL). The robustness of ecosystem service provision and biodiversity was then calculated on a per-pixel basis as the performance and stability of that pixel across all future conditions.

Performance: calculated on a per pixel basis as the mean of the cumulative sum of change in ecosystem services and/or biodiversity across all future time steps and all scenario variations. Because cumulative sums are used, both positive and negative changes are included. High performance indicates that, on average across scenarios, an area shows positive development (improvement potential) whereas low performance indicates, at best, no improvement and at worst, declining provision of ecosystem services and/or biodiversity.

Stability: measures risk and resilience and is based on the metric of undesirable deviation (Kwakkel et al. 2016). This is the sum of deviations (“regret”) from the median cumulative change for all cases below the median. In other words, stability captures the magnitude of negative outliers (risk of declines) across scenarios. High stability indicates small negative fluctuations from the median, while low stability means that severe drops occur in some scenarios.