Spatial planning for ecosystem services (ES) mainly focus on identifying areas where high and low ES provisioning occurs. However, in these assessments ES are often portrayed as non-spatial, offering only an estimate of a service at a single point in time and space. This static perspective fails, in particular, to represent mobile biodiversity-based ecosystem services. Considering the spatial dimensions of ecological processes and patterns is crucial for conservation and natural resource planning. We focus on pollination ecosystem services from social bee species (Bombus spp.). We built an agent-based, spatially-explicit simulation model of landscape pollination ecosystem services that can be used to prioritize areas of conservation and inform spatially explicit planning of the distribution of floral resources; assess trade-offs among different scenarios in terms of pollination services; and engage local stakeholders in ES planning and management. We elicited expert maps to provide a case study of how participatory mapping and scenario development can be used with the model. We asked one expert in land use policy and one expert in biodiversity conservation to draw a scenarios that represent, to them, what an ideal landscape would look like in terms of multifunctionality: a landscape that includes both production (e.g. pasture and croplands) and conservation (e.g. native vegetation for biodiversity conservation) areas. We assessed landscape pollination services (visitation rate per patch) for each scenario.
Results/Conclusions
The “production” scenarios tended to have higher pollination visitation rates compared to the “conservation” scenarios, and the more heterogeneous landscapes tended to have higher pollination service rates. Our pollination model reveals the importance of including temporal dynamics in ecosystem service assessments as some scenarios provided more floral resources in the spring than summer, which affects pollinator colony development. We demonstrate the use of a pollination simulation model as a tool in the participatory process for spatial planning and land use decision making. With the ability to input hand-drawn or computer drawn land use scenarios, decision makers and stakeholders can see how pollination services are potentially affected. Our approach can be applied to other mobile agent-based service providers (MABES) that are pollinators, pest regulators, and seed dispersers to assess how landscape structure and land use change affects these ecosystem services. Using landscape scenarios allows for the exploration of plausible futures and their effects on MABES, in turn providing information that can be used in future land use policy and decisions.