Abstract
Land use changes cause significant alterations in the land surface structure and significantly impact ecosystem services. Research on land use change (LUC) and ecosystem services has become one of the hotspots of interdisciplinary research in ecology and geography. Based on 1860 publications collected from the Web of Science Core CollectionTM (WoS), the top authors, top organizations, top journals, and subject categories were discussed in detail. For the number of published articles, Sustainability ranks first with 86 publications, providing significant contributions in domain. The keywords could be classified into six categories: land use/land cover change, conservation, biodiversity, policies and programmers, environmental change, and agriculture. Citations and reference co-citations were analyzed, and popular literature and co-cited literature in the field were identified. In the discussion, we focus on four important issues, including land use area changes, land use pattern changes, land use spatial pattern changes, and land use changes at different scales. The research framework in the field and the shortcomings of existing research are discussed as well. The main aim of the paper is to assist researchers in identifying potential gaps in the research that should be addressed in future research.
Highlights
The structure, process, and functions of ecosystems directly and indirectly provide the products and services that support human existence, which are called ecosystem services [1]
Costanza et al quantified the economic worth of benefits provided by the global ecosystem by employing the utility value theory and the equilibrium value theory in “the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital”, which was published in Nature [4]
The results showed that the patch-type areas, the maximum patch index, spread index, aggregation index, effective network area, and neighborhood percentage are positively correlated with ecosystem service value
Summary
The structure, process, and functions of ecosystems directly and indirectly provide the products and services that support human existence, which are called ecosystem services [1]. Ecosystems are fundamental to human existence and are intimately linked to benefits that are pertinent to human life. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of the use of “ecosystem services” as a scientific term [2], and the use of this term began to increase in the 1990s. Many scholars have paid attention to the economic value of forest, grassland, wetland, agricultural land, and urban ecosystem services at different scales [3]. Costanza et al quantified the economic worth of benefits provided by the global ecosystem by employing the utility value theory and the equilibrium value theory in “the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital”, which was published in Nature [4]. Daily’s landmark research “Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural
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