Abstract
Ecosystem services are benefits that the natural environment provides to support human well-being. A thorough understanding and assessment of these services are critical to maintain ecosystem services flow through sustainable land management to optimize bundles of ecosystem services provision. Maximizing one particular ecosystem service may lead to reduction in another. Therefore, identifying ecosystem services tradeoffs and synergies is key in addressing this challenge. However, the identification of multiple ecosystem services tradeoffs and synergies is still limited. A previous study failed to effectively capture the spatial interaction among ecosystem services as it was limited by “space-to-time” substitution method used because of temporal data scarcity. The study was also limited by using land use types in creating ecosystem services, which could lead to some deviations. The broad objective of this study is therefore to examine the bundles and hotspots of multiple ecosystem services and their tradeoffs in Kentucky, U.S. The study combined geographic data and spatially-explicit models to identify multiple ecosystem services bundles and hotspots, and determined the spatial locations of ecosystem services hotspots. Results showed that the spatial interactions among ecosystem services were very high: of the 21 possible pairs of ecosystem services, 17 pairs were significantly correlated. The seven ecosystem services examined can be bundled into three groups, geographically clustered on the landscape. These results support the hypothesis that some groups of ecosystem services provision can present similar spatial patterns at a large mesoscale. Understanding the spatial interactions and bundles of the ecosystem services provides essential information for evidence-based sustainable land management.
Highlights
Ecosystem services are broadly defined as the benefits obtained directly or indirectly by humans from ecosystems that improve human well-being and provide fundamental life-support for human civilization [1,2,3]
The three ecosystem services bundles were geographically clustered on the landscape
Except for water provision, the hotspots of the other six ecosystem services were all distributed at the forest landscape level, especially for timber production, nitrogen retention, and phosphorus retention (Supplementary Table S7)
Summary
Ecosystem services are broadly defined as the benefits obtained directly or indirectly by humans from ecosystems that improve human well-being and provide fundamental life-support for human civilization [1,2,3]. Assessments of ecosystem services are seen by many as a promising and effective communication tool for bridging the knowledge gap between science and policy-making, and supporting land management decisions, because they seek to highlight the multiple contributions of ecosystems to society and associated tradeoffs between different land use options [4,5,6]. In a context of the increasing demand of human society for ecosystem services, there is often an ambition to maximize ecosystem services supply and to reduce its shortfalls through prudent land management [6]. The key challenge of land management is determining how to manage multiple ecosystem services effectively to avoid unwanted tradeoffs [6,7].
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