Appreciation for agricultural sustainability and ecosystem services (ESS) has received considerable attention from the scientific community. However, research has not yet systematically and sufficiently considered the spatial dimension of ESS trade-offs as a source of conflicts. Moreover, approaches for ESS management that address a wide range of beneficiaries and their interactions at landscape scale are lacking. Our main research question is how to motivate different beneficiaries of agricultural landscapes to cooperate in reducing supply–demand mismatches and accompanied conflicts, as well as to assess how different scenarios would impact relevant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We present a novel and conceptual integrated model in which we employ a combination of three methodological tools: participatory geographic information system (PGIS), agent-based modelling (ABM) and a Bayesian belief network (BBN). The objective of our model simulation is to identify and manage site-specific spatial trade-off patterns and to provide decision support for shifting competitive behavior of individual stakeholders in satisfying their demand for ESS to a collective and cooperative scheme, while jointly striving to attain relevant targets outlined in the SDGs. Attached to this work is a short video depicting our conceptual model. We strongly suggest that tackling a complex social-ecological system necessitates a highly integrated modelling approach that fosters the transition from farm- to landscape-scale management, from individualistic to collective action, and from competitive to cooperative behavior.

Agricultural land use systems have been optimized for producing provisioning ecosystem services (ES) in the past few decades, often at the expense of regulating and cultural services. Research has focused mainly on the supply side of ES and related trade-offs, but the demand side for regulatory services remains largely neglected. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of participatory geographic information system (PGIS) methods for demand assessment in larger rural and agrarian contexts by identifying spatially explicit demand patterns for ES, thereby enlarging the body of participatory approaches to ES-based land use management. Accordingly, we map, assess, and statistically and spatially analyze different demands for five ES by different stakeholder groups in agricultural landscapes in three case studies. The results are presented in a stakeholder workshop and prerequisites for collaborative ES management are discussed. Our results show that poor correlation exists between stakeholder groups and demands for ES; however, arable land constitutes the highest share of the mapped area of demands for the five ES. These results have been validated by both the survey and the stakeholder workshop. Our study concludes that PGIS represents a useful tool to link demand assessments and landscape management systematically, especially for decision support systems.