Abstract
Urbanization, and the resulting land use/cover change, is a primary cause of the degradation of coastal wetland ecosystems. Reclamation projects are seen as a way to strike a balance between socioeconomic development and maintenance of coastal ecosystems. Our aim was to understand the ecological changes to Jiangsu’s coastal wetland resulting from land use change since 1977 by using remote sensing and spatial analyses. The results indicate that: (1) The area of artificial land use expanded while natural land use was reduced, which emphasized an increase in production-orientated land uses at the expense of ecologically important wetlands; (2) It took 34 years for landscape ecological security and 39 years for ecosystem services to regain equilibrium. The coastal reclamation area would recover ecological equilibrium only after a minimum of 30 years; (3) The total ecosystem service value decreased significantly from $2.98 billion per year to $2.31 billion per year from 1977 to 2014. Food production was the only one ecosystem service function that consistently increased, mainly because of government policy; (4) The relationship between landscape ecological security and ecosystem services is complicated, mainly because of the scale effect of landscape ecology. Spatial analysis of changing gravity centers showed that landscape ecological security and ecosystem service quality became better in the north than the south over the study period.
Highlights
Urbanization is a major cause of the loss of coastal wetlands [1], and can directly transform landscapes and affect biodiversity, ecosystem productivity, and biogeochemical cycles [2,3,4,5,6]
Ub − Ua Ua in which Ki stands for land use dynamic degree of land use category “i”; Ua and Ub refer to the quantity of each land use type at the beginning and the end of the study period, respectively; T is the scope of study period
The time required for coastal ecosystem to regain the balance was briefly discussed here from two aspects—landscape ecological security index (LESI) and Ecosystem Service Value (ESV). We found that it took ~34 years for LESI and ~39 years for ESV to become balanced
Summary
Urbanization is a major cause of the loss of coastal wetlands [1], and can directly transform landscapes and affect biodiversity, ecosystem productivity, and biogeochemical cycles [2,3,4,5,6]. It can indirectly influence ecosystems across various scales by altering abiotic environmental conditions, including climate, and soil properties, and biotic components, such as introduced exotic species [7,8,9,10]. Coastal wetlands with multi-hazard threats attract greater attention worldwide
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