Abstract
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) supplies many ecosystem services (ESs) that maintain local and global pan-Asian populations and ecosystems. The effects of climate change on ES provision in the QTP will have far-reaching impacts on the region and the many downstream ecosystems and countries that depend on ESs from the "Third Pole". This study undertook a systematic assessment of ES provision, trade-offs and synergies between four ESs (raw material provision, water yield, soil retention, and carbon storage) under future climate scenarios (representative concentration pathway). The results show that: (1) the total amount of the four ESs on the QTP is predicted to increase from 1980 to 2100 for three climate change scenarios. (2) The spatial pattern of ESs on the QTP will not change significantly in the future, and the grassland and forest ESs in the central and southern regions are predicted to increase significantly. (3) The synergistic interactions among ESs were generally consistent at three spatial scales (10 km (pixel), county and watershed scales), but with more significant synergistic effects at the watershed scale. This demonstrates the necessity for the examination of scale-dependent ES dynamics and interactions. This study will supply a reference for further research on long-term ES assessments, especially the dynamic ES changes and the spatial scale dependency of the ES interactions, and provide evidence-based strategies for formulating ecosystem management on the QTP under climate change.
Highlights
Ecosystem services (ESs) are a suite of benefits and welfare that human beings obtain from natural ecosystems and are essential to human well-being and the sustainability of human-natural systems[1]
The climate change under the three representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios indicates that the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) region will have a warming and humidification trend (Fig. 1)
The annual mean temperature in the QTP region increased from − 1.56 °C in the baseline period(1950–2005) to 0.61(± 0.37), 1.84(± 1.01) and 5.26(± 1.58) °C in 2100 under the RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios, respectively
Summary
Ecosystem services (ESs) are a suite of benefits and welfare that human beings obtain from natural ecosystems and are essential to human well-being and the sustainability of human-natural systems[1]. Climate change affects ecological processes such as hydrological processes, material cycling and vegetation growth, which in turn affects ecosystem services, and makes it difficult to predict the trajectory of future ESs in climate sensitive geographies. The effect of climate change on ecosystems has begun to be studied at the regional scale. Future climate change under specific representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios is predicted to increase flood risk in Western Africa[8], change. Analysis leading to predictions of future ESs in the QTP is needed to support policy and planning for a range of climate change scenarios where human well-being and ecosystem function are impacted. The InVEST model is more suitable for the quantitative study of large-scale ecosystem s ervices[22] This integrated model can effectively evaluate multiple ecosystem services in space and time, and visualize the evaluation results spatially
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