Spatial characteristics of land uses and ecological compensations based on payment for ecosystem services model from 2000 to 2015 in Sichuan Province, China

Abstract

The ecosystem services provision is constantly under threat by anthropogenic pressures, especially which is mainly related to land use changes. A solution proposed to address these issues is the implementation of spatial characteristics of land uses and ecological compensation (based on Payment for Ecosystem Services) programs. In this study, we developed a framework for analyzing the spatial characteristics of land uses and calculating ecological compensation from 2000 to 2015 in Sichuan Province, China. We firstly examined the utility of lacunarity analysis for detecting spatial characteristic scales of pattern of land uses. Due to large-scale and regular distribution, the spatial heterogeneity of cropland, woodland and grassland were higher than that of water body, construction land and unused land. We then investigated changes in ecosystem services in response to land use change through assignment of per unit area ecosystem service value method. The total ecosystem service value is about 10,780 billion yuan·year−1, and the woodland and grassland ecosystems contributed more to the total ecosystem service value. The critical areas (with higher ecosystem service value) for management purpose were identified depending on the heterogeneity of use services learned from spatially explicit measures. Considering the changed relationship between social and economic indicators and ecosystem service value based on spatial visualization and analysis, we finally constructed a quantitative estimate model for ecological compensation taking city (state) as study unit, and determined standard value so as to evaluate ecological compensation from 2000 to 2015. Spatial differences of the ecological compensation were significant among all the cities (states). The average payment standards of ecological compensation based on the population, ecological compensation based on city (state) area, and corrected ecological compensation were − 117.10 billion yuan, 4.41E-13 billion yuan, and − 58.55 billion yuan, respectively. The negative values suggested that the stakeholders of Sichuan Province should pay for ecological compensation, and the positive value meant the residents in the Sichuan Province can obtain the amount of ecological compensation. This proposed innovative framework provides a better understanding of spatial characteristic scales of land uses and enables evaluation of the ecological integrity of landscapes. It also fills up the gap in the field of quantitative evaluation of regional ecological compensation and provides a feasible way to reconcile the conflicts among benefits in the economic, social and ecological sectors.