Abstract
Ecosystem services (ES), defined as benefits provided by the ecosystem to society, are essential to human well-being. However, it remains unclear how they will be affected by land-use changes due to lack of knowledge and data gaps. Therefore, understanding the response mechanism of ecosystem services to land-use change is critical for developing systematic and sound land planning. In this study, we aimed to explore the impacts of land-use change on the three ecosystem services, carbon storage (CS), flood regulation (FR), and soil conservation (SC), in the ecological conservation area of Beijing, China. We first projected land-use changes from 2015 to 2030, under three scenarios, i.e., Business as Usual (BAU), Ecological Land Protection (ELP), and Rapid Economic Development (RED), by interactively integrating the Markov model (Quantitative simulation) with the GeoSOS-FLUS model (Spatial arrangement), and then quantified the three ecosystem services by using a spatially explicit InVEST model. The results showed that built-up land would have the most remarkable growth during 2015–2030 under the RED scenario (2.52% increase) at the expense of cultivated and water body, while forest land is predicted to increase by 152.38 km2 (1.36% increase) under the ELP scenario. The ELP scenario would have the highest amount of carbon storage, flood regulation, and soil conservation, due to the strict protection policy on ecological land. The RED scenario, in which a certain amount of cultivated land, water body, and forest land is converted to built-up land, promotes soil conservation but triggers greater loss of carbon storage and flood regulation capacity. The conversion between land-use types will affect trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services, in which carbon storage would show significant positive correlation with soil conservation through the period of 2015 to 2030, under all scenarios. Together, our results provide a quantitative scientific report that policymakers and land managers can use to identify and prioritize the best practices to sustain ecosystem services, by balancing the trade-offs among services.
Highlights
Ecosystem services (ES) can be defined as the various benefits—including products and services—that peoples obtain from ecosystems that contribute to human well-being or maintain the global life-supporting systems [1,2,3]
Throughout the duration of the study, most land in the ecological conservation area was predicted to remain covered by forest and shrub land; several transitions were predicted among land-use types under all three scenarios (Table 2; Figure 2)
Under the Ecological Land Protection (ELP) scenario, the total area of forest land is projected to increase by 152.38 km2 (+1.36%), but the extent of built-up land and water body remain relatively stable (+20.34 and -20.55 km2, respectively), and cultivated land decreases relatively little (-81.39 km2 )
Summary
Ecosystem services (ES) can be defined as the various benefits—including products and services—that peoples obtain from ecosystems that contribute to human well-being or maintain the global life-supporting systems [1,2,3]. In the last several decades, high demands for natural resources such as food, fuel, and shelter arising from population growth, rapid urbanization, and economic development have redoubled human efforts to enhance certain ecosystem services [4], often at the expense of others [5]. Human activities have changed global ecosystems with unprecedented intensities and rates. Forests 2020, 11, 584 services [2]. Land-use change is one of the major determinants of the supply of ES [2,6,7,8,9], as certain ES are closely correlated to specific types of land use [1,10]; for example, timber and climate regulation are mostly provided by forests [11]. The relationship between land-use change and ES is receiving extensive attention by scientists and policymakers worldwide
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