Abstract
Urban areas are the areas that are most strongly affected by human activities, which presents many challenges to the ecosystem and human well-being. Ecosystem services (ES) are a comprehensive indicator to measure the ecological effects of urbanization. To effectively identify and evaluate the impact of urbanization on ES, the spatial-temporal pattern of ES should be considered. According to the level of urbanization, Xi’an city is divided into four regions: the urban core area, the urban extended area, the rural area, and the ecological conservation area, then, five comprehensive ecosystem services (CES) are evaluated by In VEST model. The results showed the following: (1) There is an obvious spatial heterogeneity in the distribution of ES. The ecological conservation area is the hot spot of ES supply, and the low value is mostly distributed in the urban core area. (2) The CES in the urban extended area that has undergone the greatest change between 2000 and 2015, and the rates of change in the ecological conservation area are the smallest. (3) There is a significant correlation between urbanization and ES, and the correction between landscape urbanization and ES is the most significant. (4) The agglomeration relationship between urbanization and ES in different regions is not consistent. Regional division provides a new way to understand the interaction between urbanization and ES in time and space, so as to provide better guidance for policy makers in formulating sustainable development policies to alleviate the loss of ES caused by the process of urbanization.
Highlights
Ecosystem services (ES) refer to the benefits derived directly or indirectly by human beings from the ecosystem [1]
Changes in land use type were more pronounced in the urban extended area, which was manifested in the increase of urban construction land, and the decrease of grassland and cultivated land, whereas 51.2% of the urban extended area was due to the decrease in agricultural land
We presented an idea to identify the impact of urban sprawl on the supply of ES in different regions
Summary
Ecosystem services (ES) refer to the benefits derived directly or indirectly by human beings from the ecosystem [1]. Human life and economic development depend on the goods and services provided by the ecosystem. ES are important indicators linking human well-being and the ecosystem [2,3]. There have been many studies on ES, especially the assessment and quantification of urban ecosystem services (UES), which have attracted increasing interest in recent years [4,5,6,7,8,9]. As people’s dependence on ecosystem is becoming less obvious, the importance of ES is more likely to be ignored [3,13]. It is necessary to understand how to maintain and improve ES, and to integrate this knowledge into planning and decision making [10,14]
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