Abstract
Ecosystem services are characterized by region and scale, and contribute to human welfare. Taking Yantai city, a typical bay city in China, as the example, its three representative ecosystem services: food supply (FS), carbon sequestration (CS) and water yield (WY) were chosen as study targets. Based on analyzation of six different aspects of the supply and variation characteristic of demand, this study tried to propose advices for comprehensive improvement of ecosystem services for spatial optimization. The results showed that: (1) ecosystem services supply was strong in central and southern areas of Yantai, while the northern coastal areas were relatively weak; (2) synergistic relationships were found of FS-CS, FS-WY and CS-WY both in 2009 and 2015, with the strongest one for FS-WY. Additionally, in the synergistic relationships, each pair of ecosystem services was dominated by one ecosystem service; (3) most of the three pairs of synergistic relationships had the tendency to strengthen with larger scales; (4) four ecosystem demands changing areas were observed and comprehensive improvement suggestions for them were proposed. This work provides a new attempt to improve ecosystem services based on its supply-demand relationship, which will give a baseline reference for related studies in Yantai city, as well as other similar bay cities.
Highlights
Ecosystem services are the various direct or indirect benefits that people derive from ecosystems, including provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services, which are important links between ecosystems and human well-beings [1,2,3]
Yantai was mainly composed of arable land, garden plot, woodland and construction land, with the four major categories accounting for 85.5% of the total land area in 2009
The analysis indicated that precipitation and topography were the key factors affecting water yield (WY)
Summary
Ecosystem services are the various direct or indirect benefits that people derive from ecosystems, including provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services, which are important links between ecosystems and human well-beings [1,2,3]. Influenced by the diversity of ecosystem services, the complexity of ecological processes and human preferences, different ecosystem services exhibit complex interactions, which can be described as trade-offs and synergies [4,5]. Ignorance of trade-offs/synergies may lead to the supply capacity decline of some ecosystem services and eventually even threaten the stability and security of the whole ecosystem [11]. In order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and promote sustainable socio-economic development, it is important to understand the ecosystem services trade-offs/synergies and their spatial distribution characteristics to maximize human well-being
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