Collaborative Research Centre 990: Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (Sumatra, Indonesia) (Phase 3: 2020 – 2023)

Scaling-up of ecological and socioeconomic functions from local to landscape and broader scales


Throughout the project, the research efforts combined in Focus 3 centre around the following four core Hypotheses:

Ecological and socioeconomic functions and their trade-offs change from local to landscape scales.
The spatial configuration of the land-use mosaic affects ecological and socioeconomic functions as well as their variability differently at local versus landscape scales.
Land-use transformation and land-use intensification affect the scale-dependency of ecological func-tions, socioeconomic functions and their trade-offs, for example in species-area relationships.
Decisions taken at different levels (e.g., by households, farmers, companies, policy makers) affect land-use patterns (and associated implications for biodiversity and carbon emissions) at local, regional and national scales.

The development of sustainable land-use concepts requires spatially explicit analysis of the land-use mosaic, understanding how multiple functions and their trade-offs or synergies vary with and across scale, and scaling up of insights on ecological and socioeconomic functions from local to landscape and broader scales. In the upcoming Phase 3, we will explore ecological and socioeconomic functions and trade-offs across multiple spatial scales ranging from plot surroundings up to several kilometres to the scale of Jambi province and beyond (Fig. 1).


Focus 3 - Fig 1

Fig. 1.
Multiple spatial scales that will be in focus to understand changes of ecological and economic functions across scales, understand the effects of landscape heterogeneity of these functions, analyse the scale-dependency of multiple functions and their trade-offs and finally to extrapolate and upscale the patterns to larger spatial scales as basis for decision making.



Kevin Darras, Ingo Grass and Catrin Westphal (B09) and Holger Kreft (B06) are focussing on spatial distributions of species and diversity components, such as species interactions and functional and phylogenetic diversity, in relation to landscape composition and configuration. High resolution and spatially consistent landscape metrics will be derived from LiDAR point clouds, airborne and satellite images by Nicolò Camarretta, Stefan Erasmi and Michael Schlund (Z02).
Carola Paul (C12) plans to develop diversified farm portfolios to design landscape mosaics that support multiple ecosystem functions and services.
Kerstin Wiegand and Jan Salecker (B10) will finalize spectre, an R-package for scaling biodiversity patterns from plot-level observations to spatially-explicit landscape-level species communities. Together with the agent-based model EFForTS-ABM, these tools will be used to conduct landscape optimization studies, in order to find landscapes with acceptable ecosystem functioning and minimal impact on economic prosperity.
Krisztina Kis-Katos and Elías Cisneros (C10) plan to analyse country-wide forest fragmentation patterns due to deforestation. First empirical evidence shows that economic incentives to plant most of the agricultural goods are linked to higher forest fragmentation, whereas oil palm suitable areas have been experiencing forest de-fragmentation over the last decades.

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