In the last century, multi‐functional pasture‐woodlands have declined in Western Europe due to a segregation of land use into large patches of intensively used grasslands and forests. Landscape heterogeneity and habitat diversity declined from small‐grained heterogeneous patterns towards more monotonous and mono‐functional landscapes with widely known negative consequences for biodiversity. Nowadays, silvopastoral systems are among the most promising approaches for sustainable management of mountain areas world‐wide. In the Swiss Jura Mountains, wooded pastures still represent a traditional form of a semi‐natural landscape. In combined experimental and (long term) simulation studies it was shown that these ecosystems are highly sensitive to land use and climate change due to the complex interactions which drive the dynamics within a grassland‐forest‐mosaic. Simulation studies applying the spatially explicit compartment model of wooded pastures WoodPaM to wooded pastures in the Parc Jurassien Vaudois encountered the relative importance of grazing pressure and climatic stress for trees to survive in this multi‐factorial environment. Tree species composition in pastures shifts from spruce (Picea abies) to beech (Fagus sylvatica) and pine (Pinus sylvestris) following the shifting dominance of browsing, long winters or drought as environmental factors. Consequently, the ecology of beech and pine lead to landscape patterns that differ from those formed by spruce in the past. Tree species specific traits, like regeneration ability under harsh climate and in the shade of a closed canopy, as well as resistance to browsing, evoke grassland‐forest mosaics, which are very distinct from the present diverse mosaic of small stands of spruce and isolated trees in the pastures: Dependent on the degree of climate warming clumped patterns of closed beech forests emerge, which are segregated from open grassland, or the landscape is dominated by (light) pine forests. We conclude that climate adaptive management that aims at the maintenance of semi‐open landscapes and its inhabitated biodiversity is a difficult and complex task because these ecosystems might respond qualitatively different in the face of changing environmental conditions.