Abstract
Land-use/cover is one of the major factors that affect the ecosystem and the services it provides. The impact of land-use change on ecosystem service value is a hotspot in developing countries, especially China—a region with rapid economic development and rapid population growth. As the leading area of China’s reform and opening-up, Guangdong province in southern China is subjected to land-use conversion that significantly alters the capacity of natural ecosystem to provide ecosystem services supporting human well-being. We analyzed the characteristics of land-use changes from 1990 to 2018 using the four-phase land-use data interpreted from Landsat satellite images. We estimated the ecosystem service value through a well-established benefit transfer method using modified local value coefficients, analyzed the trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services through ecosystem service trade-off degree, and compared the relationship between ecosystem services value, economic development, and population in Guangdong province. The results indicated that the following: (1) Built-Up Area drastically expanded from 6783.1 km2 in 1990 to 13,142.0 km2 in 2018 (93.7%), especially in the Pearl River Delta, where the growth rate of Built-Up Area expansion was up to 169.0%. The other land-use types were all contracted as Cropland (−10.9%), Forestland (−1.0%), Grassland (−4.0%), Water Body (−2.1%), and Unused Land (−24.4%). (2) Total ecosystem service value decreased from US$121,666 billion in 1990 to US$116,432 billion in 2018 (−4.3%). Cropland, Forestland, and Water Body played the most important roles for the total ecosystem service value. Water supply experienced the largest declines in ecosystem services value (US$ −1866.3 million, −10.1%), followed by waste treatment (7.6%) and gas regulation (−4.9%). (3) Synergy was the dominant relationship among ecosystem services. The above results can not only serve as reference case for other provinces/regions/countries/ to carry out relevant research work but also provide much focus on land-use planning to manage the impacts of land-use change on regional ecosystem services function.
Highlights
IntroductionEcosystem services are the benefits and functions that ecosystems provide to human beings [1,2,3], which include ecosystem products (e.g., food production, raw material, clean water, etc.) and services (e.g., waste treatment, gas regulation, recreation and culture, etc.)
Ecosystem services are the benefits and functions that ecosystems provide to human beings [1,2,3], which include ecosystem products and services
We calculated the ecosystem service value of the six land-use types (Table 1) in Guangdong province using Equation (2): ESVs,i,t = Ai,t × VCs,i,t where Ai,t is the area of land-use type i at time t, and VCs,i,t is the per-hectare value’s coefficient of each ecosystem service s provided by each land-use type i at time t, which was derived from the standardized value coefficients by Xie et al [25] and was tailored to the study area and expressed in 2018 US$ ha−1
Summary
Ecosystem services are the benefits and functions that ecosystems provide to human beings [1,2,3], which include ecosystem products (e.g., food production, raw material, clean water, etc.) and services (e.g., waste treatment, gas regulation, recreation and culture, etc.). Humans are prone to exerting pressures on land-use through maximizing the provision of one of the few ecosystem services, which lead to a decline or loss of many others [6]. This phenomenon is widespread around the globe, and severe in the regions with rapid economic development [7,8,9] and highly urbanization areas [10,11]. The contribution of the majority of ecosystem services for human wellbeing has been considered in recent years, and people have been trying to better coordinate the relationship between human activities and the ecological environment
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