Understanding relationships between landscape multifunctionality and land-use change across spatiotemporal characteristics: Implications for supporting landscape management decisions

Abstract

Landscape elements are the basic units of the earth surface system, and their changes have a profound impact on the continuous supply of landscape functions. However, few studies address the spatiotemporal tradeoffs and synergies between landscape multifunctionality and land-use in complex urban agglomeration system. In the Wuhan metropolitan area, rapid socioeconomic development, urbanization, and industrialization process led to drastic changes in land use, generating a series of landscape function imbalance. Therefore, this study, based on multivariate data and detection model quantitatively mapped five landscape functions, explored the correlations between different land-use types and landscape functions, and explored their trade-offs and synergies. Our study showed that: for 2000–2015, residential support (RS) function increased by 13.95 people/km2, carbon sequestration (CS) and water conservation (WC) functions changed greatly, and their added values were 1226.72 gCm−2a−1, 284.51 mm, respectively, soil conservation (SC) function increased by 68.17 t hm−2, habitat maintain (HM) function decreased by 0.1. Most landscape functions showed trade-off relationships, while a few presented synergy relationships, and the spatial pattern of landscape functions had significant differences, and their distribution was uneven. The hotspots of landscape multifunctionality mainly concentrated in the Wuhan City and southeast region of the study area, and the proportions of III and IV hotspots were 36.87% and 9.56%, respectively. Furthermore, landscape functions and land-use types displayed obvious spatial non-stationary characteristics, and the bundles of similar landscape functions were significantly clustered in space, while the composition structure of landscape function was significantly different. There is an urgent need to optimize the development of surface resources and the implementation of precise policies can optimize the layout of landscape elements and improve the supply of landscape function in an orderly direction. The research results of this study can help us to provide scientific reference for landscape planning management and decision-making.