Abstract
Land use change is an important way for human activities to affect ecosystems. Based on the land use demands and policies, the simulation of future land use changes under different scenarios can test the rationality of socio-economic and policy-oriented land use changes. In this study, we set three scenarios of regular growth, ecological protection, and ecotourism development in 2030 for the Beibu Gulf area, China. We simulated the spatial distribution and evolution characteristics of the future landscape pattern using the Scenario Generator Rule Based Module of InVEST. Meanwhile, the ecosystem service value (ESV) was estimated by the improved unit area value equivalent method to reveal the trend of ESVs under different regional development models. The results indicated that the land use changes in the Beibu Gulf during 1999–2014 showed significant spatial heterogeneity. The farmland was mainly distributed in Beihai, the forestland was located in Fangchenggang, while the orchard was concentrated on Qinzhou. Due to economic construction and urban expansion, construction land and aquaculture land were gradually growing, while farmland and mud flat continued to decrease. Between 2014 and 2030, the total ESV decreased in the regular growth scenario and gradually increased in the ecological protection scenario and ecotourism development scenario. In addition, by comparing the three scenarios, the ecotourism development scenario is a more reasonable model for Guangxi Beibu Gulf area, which realized the trade-off between tourism development and resource conservation. Therefore, regional planners should not only consider maximizing ESVs when planning for ecosystem services, but also strive to maintain a reasonable structure of ecosystem services. Some suggestions were provided in this paper at the macro level and the local development model level respectively, which offered some references for the rational allocation of land resources, ecological environmental protection and ecotourism development in the coastal area of Beibu Gulf.
Highlights
IntroductionLand use change is an important way in which human activities affect ecosystems, altering the provision of ecosystem goods and services by influencing ecosystem patterns and processes, thereby affecting the function and value of ecosystem services [1,2,3]
The largest growth was observed in construction land, which increased from 1.38% in 1999 to 6.74% in 2014
By comparing regular growth scenario and ecological protection scenario, we found that the ecosystem service value (ESV) of farmland ecosystems in Fangcheng District under the regular growth scenario was higher than the ecological protection scenario, while the ESV of other districts and counties was lower than it
Summary
Land use change is an important way in which human activities affect ecosystems, altering the provision of ecosystem goods and services by influencing ecosystem patterns and processes, thereby affecting the function and value of ecosystem services [1,2,3]. Ecosystem services are rapidly degraded under strong disturbance of human activities, and the assessment of ESVs has become a research hotspot [4,5,6,7]. Land use types can serve as proxies for ecosystem services by matching with equivalent biomes to facilitate large-scale ecosystem service valuation based on remote sensing data [8]. Some studies have already discussed the relationship between land use change and ecosystem services [5,9,10].
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