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Tropical ecosystems are critical for biodiversity conservation and local people’s livelihood sustenance. However, these ecosystems are under high pressure from land-use and land cover (LULC) change, which is further projected to intensify and increase rapidly, thereby affecting biodiversity and the provisioning of vital ecosystem services (ES). It is thus important to understand how LULC might change in the future and how such changes could affect biodiversity and ES provisioning in a given landscape of tropical ecosystems. Scenario planning has become an increasingly popular tool and technique to produce narrative scenarios of the future landscape change. Thus, quantifying changes under different land-use scenarios could be a means to elucidate the synergies and trade-offs within the scenarios. In this dissertation, the author examines the future of biodiversity and ES provisioning for different plausible land-use scenarios in southwestern Ethiopia. First, he translates four future plausible narrative social-ecological land-use scenarios ("Gain over grain", "Coffee and conservation", "Mining green gold" and "Food first") developed for southwestern Ethiopia by participatory scenario planning into spatially explicit LULC scenario maps. Results showed distinct LULC changes under each scenario. Second, the author investigates the impact of these land-use scenarios on biodiversity by specifically modelling woody plant species richness in farmland and forest. Both indicators of human disturbance and environmental conditions were used. Third, he also investigates the effect of these land-use scenarios on woody plant-based ES provisioning by combining woody plant species with household surveys on how woody plants were used by the local community. He models and predicts the current and future availability of woody plant-based ES under the four scenarios of landscape change. Overall, the findings of this dissertation show the importance of integrating future land-use mapping with participatory, narrative-based scenarios to assess the social-ecological outcomes of alternative futures. The spatially explicit maps of LULC change, biodiversity and ES (at different scales) could be used as a valuable input to support stakeholders and decision-makers to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different development trajectories on ecosystems and human well-being and to avoid or minimize future undesirable consequences. To this end, apart from the benefits of coffee production under "Mining green gold" and crop production under "Food first" scenarios, the findings under these scenarios of large-scale agricultural intensification point to a potentially high loss of biodiversity and ES. These two scenarios could have a negative long-term impact on ecosystems and human well-being. Finally, the "Coffee and conservation" scenario, which involves the creation of a new biosphere reserve, appears to be the most sustainable scenario. This scenario could result in a sustainably managed, diversified landscape which could make major contributions to biodiversity conservation and human well-being in the region and beyond.