Land change scenarios impacts on ecosystem services: the case of Madeira Island 1990-2040

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesLULC changes from anthropogenic disturbance are a major impact-driven on ecosystems services and landscape metrics have been proposed for the assessment of impacts depicting spatial patterns determining the quality and state of interactions. Madeira island possesses a rich unique ecosystem the Laurel forest, a World Heritage inscribed by UNESCO. Along with a considerable amount of endemic biodiversity, fertile volcanic soils and humanized terraced landscape. Economic development and natural disasters have been triggering changes. Yet, future projections regarding LULC change are missing. In this study, the CORINE Land Cover from 1990 to 2012 is used to perform change analysis. The Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network implement in the TerrSet GIS software is applied to model four scenarios for the year 2040: Business as Usual, Conservation of Agricultural and Forests areas and Renaturation with the assessment of impacts using landscape metrics. The results show a negative trend for ecosystem services in 2040 at different rates. A trend for the fragmentation of the landscape is found mainly in Renaturation scenario with 890 patches. A more significant decrease for biomass production in Scenario Renaturation and a loss of areas for food production of -32 km2 in Scenario Conservation of Forests. Recreational and cultural areas with a loss of -32 km2 in Scenario Business as Usual followed by Conservation of Forest with -29 km2. This study contributes to Regional Planning Institutions improving monitoring and environmental resources management. Coupled with a practical application using landscape metrics for the assessment of ecosystem services accordingly with Burkhard and Maes (2017) in a context using future scenarios. Comparability from this study with other smalls islands can be performed