Abstract
Urbanization has been responsible for the loss of cropland worldwide, especially in China. Since this trend is expected to continue in the near future, China has implemented the strictest cropland protection policies in the world, to guarantee its national food security. However, the negative impact of cropland protection policies on ecosystem services has always been ignored. In this paper, we used LANDSCAPE (Land System Cellular Automata model for Potential Effects) model to assess the ecological lands loss under different scenarios in Wuhan, China during S2010–2020. Our scenarios differ in whether or not the cropland protection policy is imposed. Then, the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) model was used to calculate the amount of nutrient export under two different scenarios and to analyze the mechanism of impact of Cropland Balance Policy on water purification. Results show that the scenarios with strict cropland protection (CP) will lead to more losses of ecological lands compared with scenarios without cropland protection (NCP). Besides, the nitrogen export in the CP scenario is average 8.6% higher than the NCP scenario, which indicates that the Cropland Balance Policy has a negative impact on water purification. The nitrogen export is transported mainly by subsurface, which is 1.73 times higher than the surface averaged over the two scenarios. Accordingly, this study proposed that reasonable land use planning, and lowering the nutrient delivery ratio would be more beneficial to the ecosystem service of water purification.
Highlights
With ongoing population growth, economic development and rural-to-urban migration, global urbanization is at the stage of rapid development [1]
The solid circles indicate that more forest lands are occupied by cropland displacement in scenarios with strict cropland protection policies (CP scenario) than those without such policies (NCP scenario), while the dashed circles demonstrate that more wetlands are taken by built-up expansion in CP scenario than that in No strict Cropland Protection scenario (NCP) scenario
The result of CP scenario shows both direct and indirect ecological lands loss: it is lost due to conversion into built-up area, as well as through conversion into cropland to compensate for cropland losses elsewhere as a result of urbanization (Figure 3b)
Summary
Economic development and rural-to-urban migration, global urbanization is at the stage of rapid development [1]. The implementation of strict cropland protection policies in rapid urbanization area may lead to extra ecological land loss and ecosystem services degradation. Many scholars discovered that land use change plays an important role on ecosystem services of water purification Activities such as agriculture, industry and urban development have a negative impact on water purification [10,11]. We explored the impacts of the implementation of strict cropland protection policy on ecological lands, as well as the ecosystem services, water purification, for the city of. We applied the calibrated LANDSCAPE model [14] to simulated different land use changes in Wuhan between 2010 and 2020 under the two scenarios, by calculating the area of forest land, grassland and wetland, separately, in different scenarios to reflect the impact of strict cropland protection policy on ecological lands loss. The InVEST model was used to calculate the amount of nutrient export from land use under two different scenarios and analyze the main factors for the impacts of policy on ecosystem service of water purification
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