Past and future impacts of land-use changes on ecosystem services in Austria.

Environmental and socio-economic developments induce land-use changes with potentially negative impacts on human well-being. To counteract undesired developments, a profound understanding of the complex relationships between drivers, land use, and ecosystem services is needed. Yet, national studies examining extended time periods are still rare.

Extending shared socio-economic pathways for pesticide use in Europe: Pest-Agri-SSPs.

While pesticides are essential to agriculture and food systems to sustain current production levels, they also lead to significant environmental impacts. The use of pesticides is constantly increasing globally, driven mainly by a further intensification of agriculture, despite stricter regulations and higher pesticide effectiveness. To further the understanding of future pesticide use and make informed farm-to-policy decisions, we developed Pesticide Agricultural Shared Socio-economic Pathways (Pest-AgriSSPs) in six steps.

Farmers' Intended Weed Management after a Potential Glyphosate Ban in Austria.

Glyphosate is controversially discussed because of its alleged harmful effects on human health and the environment. Although it is approved until December 2022 in the European Union, the Austrian government discusses a national ban. Research on farmers' intentions to deal with upcoming pesticide policy changes is limited and planned responses to a national glyphosate ban may inform accompanying measures and the development of weed management alternatives.

Dynamic soil functions assessment employing land use and climate scenarios at regional scale.

Soils as key component of terrestrial ecosystems are under increasing pressures. As an advance to current static assessments, we present a dynamic soil functions assessment (SFA) to evaluate the current and future state of soils regarding their nutrient storage, water regulation, productivity, habitat and carbon sequestration functions for the case-study region in the Lower Austrian Mostviertel. Carbon response functions simulating the development of regional soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks until 2100 are used to couple established indicator-based SFA methodology with two climate and three land use scenarios, i.

Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture and food systems: The Eur-Agri-SSPs.

Scenarios describe plausible and internally consistent views of the future. They can be used by scientists, policymakers and entrepreneurs to explore the challenges of global environmental change given an appropriate level of spatial and sectoral detail and systematic development. We followed a nine-step protocol to extend and enrich a set of global scenarios - the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) - providing regional and sectoral detail for European agriculture and food systems using a one-to-one nesting participatory approach.

Exploring farmers' behavior toward individual and collective measures of Western Corn Rootworm control - A case study in south-east Austria.

Invasive species are considered a major threat for global agricultural production, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Their spread and establishment is mainly influenced by bio-physical factors, but also by people's activities such as tourism or farming. Understanding farmers' behavior is necessary to develop effective control measures.

Ten principles to integrate the water-energy-land nexus with climate services for co-producing local and regional integrated assessments.

The water-energy-land nexus requires long-sighted approaches that help avoid maladaptive pathways to ensure its promise to deliver insights and tools that improve policy-making. Climate services can form the foundation to avoid myopia in nexus studies by providing information about how climate change will alter the balance of nexus resources and the nature of their interactions. Nexus studies can help climate services by providing information about the implications of climate-informed decisions for other economic sectors across nexus resources.

A protocol to develop Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture.

Moving towards a more sustainable future requires concerted actions, particularly in the context of global climate change. Integrated assessments of agricultural systems (IAAS) are considered valuable tools to provide sound information for policy and decision-making. IAAS use storylines to define socio-economic and environmental framework assumptions.

The economic value of stochastic climate information for agricultural adaptation in a semi-arid region in Austria.

Identifying efficient adaptation measures in land and water use requires integrated approaches and a spatially and temporally explicit representation of water demand and supply. Stochastic climate information may further improve adaptation assessments to reduce the risk of misinterpretation of climate signals. We aim at developing an integrated modeling framework (IMF) that meets these requirements for assessing impacts of three stochastic climate scenarios (DRY, SIMILAR, WET), and regional irrigation water restrictions on land and water use.

Exploring Farmers' Climate Change Perceptions and Adaptation Intentions: Empirical Evidence from Austria.

The lack of timely adaptation in agriculture may hamper prosperous farm developments by neglecting risks and opportunities emerging from climate change. Understanding farmers' perceptual and socio-cognitive processes is key in order to encourage on-farm adaptation. We aim at investigating how farmers' individual cognition on climate change and adaptation as well as socio-environmental context factors affect agricultural adaptation intention and avoidance.

The Stimuli-Actions-Effects-Responses (SAER)-framework for exploring perceived relationships between private and public climate change adaptation in agriculture.

Empirical findings on actors' roles and responsibilities in the climate change adaptation process are rare even though cooperation between private and public actors is perceived important to foster adaptation in agriculture. We therefore developed the framework SAER (Stimuli-Actions-Effects-Responses) to investigate perceived relationships between private and public climate change adaptation in agriculture at regional scale. In particular, we explore agricultural experts' perceptions on (i) climatic and non-climatic factors stimulating private adaptation, (ii) farm adaption actions, (iii) potential on-farm and off-farm effects from adaptation, and (iv) the relationships between private and public adaptation.

A novel integrated modelling framework to assess the impacts of climate and socio-economic drivers on land use and water quality.

Changes in climatic conditions will directly affect the quality and quantity of water resources. Further on, they will affect them indirectly through adaptation in land use which ultimately influences diffuse nutrient emissions to rivers and therefore potentially the compliance with good ecological status according to the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). We present an integrated impact modelling framework (IIMF) to track and quantify direct and indirect pollution impacts along policy-economy-climate-agriculture-water interfaces.