Abstract
Climate change and global rapid agricultural expansion have drastically reduced the area of wetlands globally recently, so that the ecosystem functions of wetlands have been impacted severely. Therefore, this study integrated the land use data and the integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs (InVEST) model to evaluate the impacts of the land-use change (LUC) on wetland ecosystem services (ES) from 1976 to 2016 in the Tumen River Basin (TRB). Results reveal that the area of wetlands in TRB had decreased by 22.39% since 1976, mainly due to the rapid conversion of wetlands to dry fields and construction lands, and the LUC had induced notable geospatial changes in wetland ES consequently. A marked decrease in carbon storage and water yield was observed, while the habitat quality was enhanced slightly. Specifically, the conversion of rivers and paddy fields to ponds and reservoirs were the main reasons for the increase in habitat quality and caused the habitat quality to increase by 0.09. The conversion of marshes to lakes, paddy fields, grasslands, dry fields, and artificial surfaces were the key points for the decline in carbon storage; the conversion of marshes to lakes (5.38 km2) and reservoir ponds (1.69 km2) were the dominant factors driving the losses of water yield. According to our results, we should center on the conservation of wetlands and rethink the construction of the land use. The findings are expected to provide a theoretical reference and basis for promoting environmental protection in TRB and the construction of ecological civilization in border areas.
Highlights
Ecosystem services (ES) refer to the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems [1]
We analyzed the impacts of land-use change (LUC) on wetland ES in the Tumen River Basin (TRB) from 1976 to 2016
We found that the area of wetlands in the TRB showed a rapid diminishing trend
Summary
Ecosystem services (ES) refer to the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems [1]. Wetlands are the areas of marsh, peatland or water, whether natural or artificial, permanent or temporary, with water that is static or flowing, fresh, brackish or salt, including areas of marine water whose depth at low tide does not exceed six meters [2]. Under the background of the industrial revolution and global warming, wetland degradation has been a global and tricky problem [3,4,5,6,7]. Approximately 50% of wetlands have disappeared due to human interference since 1970 [8,9,10,11]. Nearly 40% of the intertidal wetlands in China have disappeared since 1990, and the losses of waterbird habitats in eastern China were as high as 19.4%
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