A new European land systems representation accounting for landscape characteristics

Context: While land use change is the main driver of biodiversity loss, most biodiversity assessments either ignore it or use a simple land cover representation. Land cover representations lack the representation of land use and landscape characteristics relevant to biodiversity modeling. Objectives: We developed a comprehensive and high-resolution representation of European land systems on a 1-km2 grid integrating important land use and landscape characteristics. Methods: Combining the recent data on land cover and land use intensities, we applied an expert-based hierarchical classification approach and identified land systems that are common in Europe and meaningful for studying biodiversity. We tested the benefits of using this map as compared to land cover information to predict the distribution of bird species having different vulnerability to landscape and land use change. Results: Next to landscapes dominated by one land cover, mosaic landscapes cover 14.5% of European terrestrial surface. When using the land system map, species distribution models demonstrate substantially higher predictive ability (up to 19% higher) as compared to models based on land cover maps. Our map consistently contributes more to the spatial distribution of the tested species than the use of land cover data (3.9 to 39.1% higher). Conclusions: A land systems classification including essential aspects of landscape and land management into a consistent classification can improve upon traditional land cover maps in large-scale biodiversity assessment. The classification balances data availability at continental scale with vital information needs for various ecological studies.