Abstract
Although many land-use patterns have been established to restore vegetation and eliminate poverty in the karst area in southwest China, the ecosystem services (ESs) of these patterns are still not fully understood. To compare the differences in seven typical monoculture patterns and three agroforestry patterns, their ESs and tradeoffs were analyzed within the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Framework. Compared with the local traditional corn pattern, the marigold pattern improved provisioning, regulating, and cultural services by >100%. The pomegranate pattern provided far more provisioning services than the other patterns. The apple + soybean intercropping pattern reduced regulating services, and eventually, its Total ESs (TES) and ecosystem multifunctionality index (EMF) also decreased. Cultural services will be enhanced by the introduction of fruit trees, as well as intercropping. Orange + peach had the greatest negative tradeoffs between provisioning and regulating services (P-R), provisioning and supporting services (P-S), and provisioning and cultural services (P-C), which indicates that the provisioning services urgently require improvement. Peach + pumpkin intercropping decreased the negative tradeoffs of P-R, P-S, and P-C (all > 10%), while pomegranate + grass intercropping increased the negative tradeoffs of R-S and R-C (all > 100%). Our results suggest that all six of these patterns are worthy of promotion but the pomegranate pattern should be given priority. Among the three intercropping patterns studied herein, the apple + soybean pattern should be redesigned to improve performance.
Highlights
Ecosystem services (ESs) are broadly defined as the benefits that humans receive from natural ecological processes [1,2], which are generally classified into provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services [3]
(seven which indicators) withinformation seven monoculture patterns and three the present research, we compared four types of with seven monoculture intercropping patterns, and the results showed that the corn patterns performed the worst and the patterns and three intercropping patterns, the results showed that the corn patterns performed pomegranate
Our study found that existing agroforestry patterns do provide better ecosystem services (ESs) overall, especially pomegranate patterns
Summary
Ecosystem services (ESs) are broadly defined as the benefits that humans receive from natural ecological processes [1,2], which are generally classified into provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services [3]. Most of the evaluations and cartographic research on ESs were carried out at large spatial scales, which, to some extent, restricted the application of evaluation results to small and medium scales [11,12,13]. There is an urgent need to further develop assessment and mapping methods to facilitate research on ESs at small and medium scales, which would provide a scientific basis for the coordinated development of regional natural–social–economic complex systems.
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