In mountains, grasslands managed for livestock production sustain local economies, culture and identity. However, their future fodder production is highly uncertain under climate change: while an extended growing season may be beneficial, more frequent and intense summer droughts could also reduce fodder quantity and quality. Land use and land cover (LULC) changes are another major driver of regional grassland biomass production, but combined effects of future land use transitions and climate change are rarely quantified.

We modelled combined climate and LULC scenarios for grassland production of the Maurienne Valley (French Alps) by 2100. We built a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) from long-term grassland production monitoring data complemented with expert knowledge. We assessed the potential of two candidate adaptations, intensification as an incremental solution, and silvopastoralism as a transformative solution to compensate combined impacts of two climate scenarios and three land use change scenarios.

Total biomass production was far more sensitive to LULC than to climate scenarios. Production losses were largest under the Conservation LULC scenario (-28% on average between 2020 and 2085), followed by the Tourism development scenario (-7%) and the Business-as-Usual scenario (+3%). Climate change under RCP 8.5 altered the seasonality of production by increasing potential production from May to July while decreasing summer regrowth. Intensification somewhat compensated effects of climate and LULC changes on biomass production, whereas silvopastoralism offered only marginal gains. The Bayesian network model explicitly captured a future increase in interannual variability in biomass production.

Synthesis and application: Changes in LULC are more decisive for global biomass production than climate change. However, under the most extreme climate change scenario (RCP8.5), the seasonal shift in production and increased interannnual variability threaten the current grass-based Protected Designation of Origin production system. Only the intensification adaptation solution showed significant gains in total biomass production. Still, the silvopastoralism would require less investment compared to the intensification and have a similar efficiency when assessing the gains of biomass by the surface concerned with adaptation solutions.  

This dataset was produced using a Bayesian Belief Network that estimate the biomass production across time and scenarios of future land use and land cover change. 

For a full description of the methodology see: A Bayesian analysis of adaptation of mountain grassland production to global change published in JOAE in 2024.