Investigating the spatio-temporal interactive relationship between land use structure and ecosystem services in urbanizing China

Abstract

The negative impacts of urbanization-triggered land use changes on ecosystem services have attracted worldwide attention. However, the interactive relationships between land use structure and ecosystem services remain unclear, which is not conducive to sustainable regional ecological management. This study employed the information entropy and ecosystem services value assessment method to measure the land use structure and ecosystem services at the county level in China between 2000 and 2020, respectively. Then the spatial correlation analysis and decoupling model were used to explore the spatial and temporal interactive relationships between them, respectively. The results indicated that the average information entropy of land use structure (IELUS) and total ecosystem services value (ESV) in China both showed a continuous growth trend during the study period. ESV and IELUS were found to have a significant positive spatial correlation and were dominated by low-value agglomeration. The dominant types of the interactive relationship between IELUS and ESV were strong decoupling and expansion negative decoupling, and the number of counties with expansion negative decoupling decreased rapidly during the study period. These results suggest that differentiated land-use structure management policies ought to be adopted to protect regional ecosystem services.