Land Use Change and Habitat Degradation: A Case Study from Tomar (Portugal)

From the beginning of the 21st century, following major global and European initiatives such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity (2010), the idea that ecosystem services could be used as a decision support tool, gained considerable importance in several fields: from economy to public policy, from territorial planning to environmental assessment. Defined as the set of goods and services provided by ecosystems for the benefit of humans life quality, they express the potential to overcome traditional and not sufficiently effective approaches of policies and interventions undertaken so far for biodiversity conservation purposes. In urban and territorial planning disciplines, it is therefore necessary testing new tools capable of spatially explaining territorial components that constitute biodiversity hotspots or, specularly, threats to biological diversity persistence and resilience. Taking part to this methodological framework, this work assesses changes in habitat quality, considered as a proxy for biodiversity, in Tomar (Portugal), a study area particularly affected by forest fires-driven degradation phenomena. Results highlight the potential of such tools in explicating the role of different territorial threats on biodiversity conservation and points out the importance of proper natural and semi-natural environments’ management.