Abstract
Land use/land cover (LULC) patterns seriously affect ecosystem services (ESs), especially in highly developed urban agglomerations. Exploring how LULC and ESs change spatially across urban hierarchical levels and understanding the possible mechanisms can promote the sustainable planning of urban landscapes. By mapping the spatial patterns of LULC and ESs in the three largest urban agglomerations of China, this study aimed to (1) identify the scaling relations of LULC and ESs across different urban hierarchical levels, (2) explore the possible mechanisms of these two types of spatial scaling, and (3) examine how the scaling relations of ESs relate to LULC and the policy implications. Based on LULC, we used the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model and other biophysical models to quantify ES indicators. Then, scalograms were used to quantify the scaling relations of LULC and ESs with respect to changing spatial extent. Developed land and cropland exhibited the most predictable responses with changing spatial extent. Compared to other ESs, provisioning services were the most predictable. The predictable scaling relations of ESs at different urban hierarchical levels fell into two general types: power laws at the city proper level and exponential relationships at the metropolitan region and urban agglomeration levels. The scaling relations of both LULC and ESs varied across urban hierarchical levels. The spatial scaling of ESs was closely related to LULC patterns. Integrating the scaling relations of ESs into land use planning can help decision-makers formulate multi-scale landscape conservation strategies.
Highlights
For the past few decades, many parts of the world have been undergoing dramatic and rapid urbanization (Stokes and Seto, 2019)
The predictable scaling relations of ecosystem services (ESs) at different urban hierarchical levels fell into two general types: power laws at the city proper level and exponential relationships at the metropolitan region and urban agglomeration levels
The spatial scaling of ESs was closely related to LULC patterns
Summary
For the past few decades, many parts of the world have been undergoing dramatic and rapid urbanization (Stokes and Seto, 2019). Various studies have used population density (Normile 2016; Poku-Boansi 2021) or built-up land area (Seto et al 2012; Xu et al 2018) to represent or measure urbanization. The urbanization population rate in China increased from 17.9% in 1978 to 59.6% in 2018 (Wu et al 2020), and the urban land area expanded from 21,770 km to 74,827 km in the same period (Kuang 2020a). This rapid urbanization has caused dramatic changes in land use/land cover (LULC) compositions and structures with high spatial heterogeneity (Hasan et al 2020; Lawler et al 2014). As the basis of assessing ESs, LULC changes have resulted in myriad impacts on natural resources and further threatening ESs from a local to global scale, such as with water scarcity (Li et al 2020), climate change (Patra et al 2018), soil erosion (Hu et al 2019), and habitat loss
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