Potential impacts of climate change on ecosystem services in Europe: The case of pest control by vertebrates

Abstract

Global environmental changes threaten ecosystems and cause significant alterations to the supply of ecosystem services that are vital for human well-being. We provide an assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on the European diversity of vertebrates and their associated pest-control services. We modeled the distributions of the species that provide these services using forecasts from bioclimatic envelope models and then used the results to generate maps of potential species richness among vertebrate providers of pest-control services. We assessed how the potential richness of pest-control providers would change according to different climate and greenhouse emissions scenarios. We found that the potential richness of pest-control providers was likely to face substantial reductions, especially in southern European countries whose economies were highly dependent on agricultural yields. In much of central and northern Europe, where countries' economies were less dependent on agriculture, climate change was likely to benefit pest-control providers.