Prospective evaluation of the impact of land use change on ecosystem services in the Ourika watershed, Morocco

Abstract Land use change at the local stage affects the flow of ecosystem services at all levels. Analyzing the causes of land use change such as anthropogenic activities in the case of the Ourika watershed will facilitate sustainable policies. A decision-making tool, InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade Offs) was used to quantify three ecosystem services and to generate three spatially explicit land use scenarios (trend, development and conservation) with expert stakeholders and the local population. The results indicate that forest expansion under the conservation scenario increased carbon sequestration and sediment retention by 34.29 % and 7.17 % but decreased water yield by 0.75 %. Comparably, a combination of forest and cropland expansion under the trend scenario generated a moderate increase by 8.4 % and 0.98 % but a negligible decrease of 0.09 %. A decline in the forests under the development scenario caused an improvement in the water yield by 0.12 % but a decrease in carbon sequestration and sediment retention by 6.06 % and 0.88 % respectively. A combination of forests and croplands through agroforestry systems enhances the provision of all the three ecosystem services. Community-based ecosystem and land management is the best way to improve ecosystem services at the local level.