A method to identify the variable ecosystem services relationship across time: a case study on Yanhe Basin, China

Abstract

Ecosystem services are increasingly recognized as the foundations of a well-functioning society. Large-scale ecological restoration projects have been implemented around China with the goal of restoring and sustaining ecosystem services, especially in vulnerable semi-arid regions where soil and water resources are most stressed due to historic human activities. The relationships among ecosystem services are often driven by land-use changes. It is necessary to develop an applicable method to explore the relationships between ecosystem services and driving factors over time. We selected the Yanhe Basin on China’s Loess Plateau as the study area, which has experienced a large-scale Grain for Green Project (GGP), and quantified four ecosystem services (soil conservation, water retention, water yield, and crop production). The results of this study show that different trends have occurred for ecosystem services during 2000–2008. We found potential tradeoffs between soil conservation and water yield. Synergies may exist among water retention and soil conservation/water yield. Two types of preconditions were pointed out in the analysis process to define the potential relationships among ecosystem service variables. The correspondence analysis was used to explore its intrinsic linkage and its variations among ecosystem services, land uses, and spatial locations. It suggests that the intensities of the ecosystem services provided by most of land uses and the internal proportion of regulating service to provision service in a sub-basin has been changed by GGP, but the relative spatial patterns of ecosystem services are still being maintained in entire basin scale from 1980 to 2008.