Land Use Zoning for Conserving Ecosystem Services under the Impact of Climate Change: A Case Study in the Middle Reaches of the Heihe River Basin

Chenchen Shi,Zhihui Li,Yongwei Yuan,Jinyan Zhan,Feng Wu

doi:10.1155/2015/496942

Abstract

Ecosystem services are the benefit human populations derive directly and indirectly from the natural environment. They suffer from both the human intervention, like land use zoning change, and natural intervention, like the climate change. Under the background of climate change, regulation services of ecosystem could be strengthened under proper land use zoning policy to mitigate the climate change. In this paper, a case study was conducted in the middle reaches of the Heihe River Basin to assess the ecosystem services conservation zoning under the change of land use associated with climate variations. The research results show the spatial impact of land use zoning on ecosystem services in the study area which are significant reference for the spatial optimization of land use zoning in preserving the key ecosystem services to mitigate the climate change. The research contributes to the growing literature in finely characterizing the ecosystem services zones altered by land use change to alleviate the impact of climate change, as there is no such systematic ecosystem zoning method before.

Highlights

Ecosystem services are the natural environment provision and utility the ecosystem provides upon which human-beings survival lie [1]
While there is lack of a successful model and systematic method to accomplish this goal in the academia, this paper addressed the issue by presenting a case study research aimed at empirically exploring how land use zoning will affect the ecosystem services
The system is composed of the following four principal components: indicator system for ecosystem services evaluation based on analytic hierarchy process (ISESE-AHP), ranking matrix of ecosystem services based on factor analysis (RMES-FA), identification of the core ecosystem services based on principal component evaluation (ICES-PCE), and identification and zoning of ecosystem services based on unsupervised fuzzy clustering (IDES-UFC)

Summary

Introduction

Ecosystem services are the natural environment provision and utility the ecosystem provides upon which human-beings survival lie [1]. It is the material basis to maintain the human survival and support earth life system [2]. The degree of human demand influences the sustaining of the ecosystem services [4]. The services provided by the ecosystem directly affect the human well-being [5, 6]. Both natural and human interventions will exert great influence on the ecosystem services, which will hinder the social and economic development and have an impact on the human well-being

Methods

Results

Conclusion