Impacts of urban expansion on wetland ecosystem services in the context of hosting the Winter Olympics: a scenario simulation in the Guanting Reservoir Basin, China

Abstract

Assessing the impacts of urban expansion on the wetland ecosystem in rapidly urbanizing basins is closely related to understanding regional sustainability. In this study, we adopted the Land Use Scenario Dynamics-urban (LUSD-urban) model, landscape metrics, ecosystem service (ES) mapping methods, and scenario analysis to simulate and assess the impacts of urban expansion on the wetland landscape patterns and the ESs of the Guanting reservoir basin in China, which is an important water resource conservation region for Beijing and the scheduled host region for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. We found that urban expansion in this basin would exert negative impacts on the wetland landscape pattern and ESs in the future. Under the influence of projected urban expansion in 2015–2040, the wetland landscape would be increasingly fragmented and disconnected, with the patch density increasing by up to 1.64%, and the connectance would decrease by up to 0.15%. In addition, the loss would reach 2.34%–2.88%, 2.23%–2.83%, and 8.41%–10.66% for water conservation, habitat quality, and water quality purification, respectively. The results suggested that the negative impacts could be effectively mitigated by restricting urban expansion in wetlands and that as distance to the wetland increased, different strategies should be used to offset the negative impacts. Effective measures are thus needed to preserve wetland in this rapidly urbanizing basin.