Linking social-ecological management and ecosystem service bundles: Lessons from a peri-urban agriculture landscape

Abstract

Peri-urban ecosystems especially peri-urban agriculture play an important part in multiple dimensions of both rural and urban sustainability and resilience. Yet such ecosystems on which diverse services depend are not given the commensurate concerns like city themes, and thus the lack of understanding about the interdependence characteristic within ES variation and the driving mechanism of socio-environmental factors limits effective ecological policymaking and urban-rural planning. In this study, we provided a framework revealing the complicated relationship of ecosystem services in a peri-urban area in southern Shanghai, China which is dominated by agricultural landscapes. Our findings stem from a combination of mapping quantification, statistical approaches and GIS-based techniques. The results showed that the provisioning services show trade-offs to some extent with regulating and cultural services. Six distinct ecosystem service bundles are identified and they are shaped by numerous site-specific characteristics which foster the orientation of ecosystem service management toward multifunctionality. We concluded that the spatially explicit information with GIS-based trade-off analysis is an efficient way to uncover the complicated relationships among various ecosystem services. The optimization of land cover forms and landscape characteristics is required for the sustainable management of agricultural landscapes. Ecosystem service bundles incorporating landscape features and differentiated perceptions of local residents provide rich evidence for the formulation of sustainable cultural land management strategies. They should be regarded as an indispensable element in developing both city and rural planning and multifunctional management.