Abstract
A key challenge to the sustainability and security of grassland capacity is the protection of water-related ecosystem services (WESs). With the change of land use, the supply of aquatic ecosystem services has changed, and the grassland-carrying capacity has been affected. However, the correlation mechanism between WESs and the grassland-carrying capacity is not clear. In this study, we used the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) model to evaluate the impact of land-use change on WESs, and made a tradeoff analysis between WESs and grassland-carrying capacity. Considering that the Heihe River Basin (HRB) was an important grassland vegetation zone, which was a milestone for the development of animal husbandry in China, HRB was taken as a case. The main findings are as follows: (1) the spatial distribution of WESs shows the dissimilation rule, the upper reaches are the main water yield area, the soil retention is weakening in the middle and lower reaches, and the pollution has further increased in the middle and upper reaches. (2) The carrying capacity of animal husbandry decreased in the upper reaches, increased in Shandan County and Zhangye City in the middle reaches, and decreased sharply in other regions. (3) There was a positive correlation between the livestock-carrying capacity and nitrogen export in 2018, which was increasing. As the change of land use has changed the evapotranspiration structure, WESs have undergone irreversible changes. Meanwhile, the development of large-scale irrigated farmland and human activities would be the source of a further intensification of regional soil erosion and water pollution. Therefore, it is necessary to trade off the WESs and animal husbandry under land-use change. This paper revealed how WESs changed from 2000 to 2018, the characteristics of the changes in the spatial and temporal distribution, and the carrying capacity. It aims to provide a scientific basis for coordinating the contradiction between grassland and livestock resources, improving the regional ecological security situation, and carrying out ecosystem management.
Highlights
IntroductionIn the context of global change, with the rapid development of the economy and society, most of the Earth’s Ecosystem Services have experienced a decreasing trend, primarily due to the increasing human dominance in the natural environment [1,2,3]
Middle, and lower reaches of Heihe River Basin (HRB) (Table S5 in SI), the bare land in the upper reaches increased by 768.80 km2, and the grassland and wetland decreased by 422.36 km2 and 678.48 km2, respectively
The grassland in the lower reaches increased by 7080.34 km2, and the bare land decreased by 7089.54 km2
Summary
In the context of global change, with the rapid development of the economy and society, most of the Earth’s Ecosystem Services have experienced a decreasing trend, primarily due to the increasing human dominance in the natural environment [1,2,3]. From a watershed to a global scale, the changes of WESs caused by land-use and landcover change (LUCC) have attracted much attention. Land-use change leads to land-cover change, which has important impacts on hydrological processes and water ecology [4,5,6]. The process of land-use change is closely related to the level of ecological environment security, and unreasonable land-use patterns often become the inducing factors that threaten regional ecological security [7]. Land conversion results in a negative externality, mediated by changes in biodiversity [8]
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