Spatial priority areas for individual and multiple hydrological ecosystem services with economic costs across teshio watershed, northernmost of Japan

Abstract

Spatial priority areas for individual and multiple hydrological ecosystem services with economic costs across watershed through systematic conservation model represent a significant step toward cost-effective, transparent allocation of resources for ecosystem conservation and socio-economic development. However, current studies demonstrated that few economic costs derived from natural resources into hydrological ecosystem services reserve networks were involved into spatial conservation of hydrological ecosystem services. Therefore, there is a need for more challenging and integrated testing of economic costs to systematic conservation of hydrological ecosystem services across real-world watershed in order to build effective and reliable priority areas for hydrological ecosystem services. Here though systematic conservation model, we constructed spatial priority areas for multiple hydrological ecosystem services with different economic costs in Teshio watershed, northernmost of Japan. We demonstrated that economic costs impacted on the changes in spatial priority areas under a set of conservation targets and can obviously shift spatial patterns of priority areas for individual and multiple hydrological ecosystem services, which can increase the cost-effectiveness success of ecosystem service conservation for different stakeholders. Additionally, we examined how spatial correlations between priority areas for individual and multiple hydrological services under different economic cost scenarios, which can be recognized as surrogates to measure the ecosystem services tradeoffs from economic and ecological standpoint in the reserve networks designs. Therefore, integrating economic costs into ecosystem-based conservation in watershed is more-comprehensive ecological-economic conservation framework.