Modeling of Land Cover Change Impacts on Habitat Quality of a Forested Landscape in the Sarvelat and Javaherdasht

Biodiversity as a supporting service of forest ecosystems is declining globally due to land conversion and degradation in response to human needs for food production and settlements. To make informed decisions, evaluation of change impacts under stakeholder-defined scenarios is considered to be an appropriate method which considers the consequences of decline. While land use/cover change modeling is an urgent need, it usually is faced with obstacles due to the methodological problems and lack of explicit spatial data. In this paper, we applied two spatially explicit tools, The Scenario Generator and The Habitat Quality from the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) suite of models, to project the future changes of the Sarvelat and Javaherdasht mountain system in northern Iran, based on land suitability and stakeholder's interests. We also explored the existing spatial patterns of habitat quality as a proxy for biodiversity and predicted its changes in plausible future. In this regard, after quantification of land use/cover changes based on predictive scenario, the degrees of land degradation and habitat quality under both current and future situations were compared. The results showed that any changes outside of protected boundaries, can impact habitat quality inside of the protected areas, as the new threat sources as well as external driving forces of the change occure. Since, the ecosystem supporting services specifically the biodiversity, is usually ignored in landscape planning due to its complex nature of the analysis, the mapped quantified outputs of these models can effectively make easier for decision makers, to understand the distribution patterns and existing richness of biodiversity across a landscape and make compatible policies based on multiple ecosystem services capability.