Biodiversity in boreal Sweden : what aspects are appreciated, and how will the biodiversity change in the coming decades?

Humans affect the environment at both local and global scales and the manifold of these influences are considered major threats to global biodiversity. Both climate change and land-use change have been two major drivers of the transformation in biodiversity. The observed and projected changes in biodiversity by experts may not correspond with the general appreciation among inhabitants or visitors of a region. This is why the study goals were to (I) find the importance of biodiversity in two boreal landscapes in Sweden for both inhabitants and visitors; (II) discover if plausible future changes to land use with considering global change will affect biodiversity in these catchments; and (III) whether such projected biodiversity change would affect people’s appreciation. The survey fieldwork was set in the summer of 2019 in the Vindeln and Sävjaån area of Sweden and the biodiversity scenarios assessments were conducted with the use of BioScore. In both catchments, survey participants found that the most essential element of nature was a variety of wildlife and large areas of ‘untouched’ nature. Respondents answers could be connected to either how aesthetically pleasing nature is, tourism, the possibility of physical outdoor activities or from a conservational viewpoint. The BioScore results showed that the present state Sweden had the most stable number of species whilst the SSP1-scenario has more potentially increasing species than SSP3 for both catchments. Such projected biodiversity change would affect the people’s appreciation as less variety in forest composition would occur and a substantial loss in biodiversity is possible under these scenarios. The environmental variables quantified in BioScore had a stronger negative effect than land cover change for the SSP3-scenario, while the opposite occurred in SSP1. Both land cover change and environmental change affect future biodiversity but are likely to affect different species groups differently