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Spatially explicit quantification of the interactions among ecosystem services

Landscape Ecology volume 32, pages 1181–1199 (2017)Cite this article

Abstract

Context

Human demands for ecosystem services (ES) have tremendously changed the landscape and led to degradation of ecosystems and associated services. The resolving of current eco-environmental problems calls for better understanding of the spatially explicit ES interactions to guide targeted land-use policy-making.

Objectives

We propose a framework to map ES in continuous time-series, based on which we further quantify interactions among multiple ES.

Methods

The supply of three key ES—soil conservation (SC), net primary production (NPP) and water yield (WY)—were quantified and mapped at fine-resolution from 2000 to 2013 using easily-accessible spatial data. Pairwise ES interactions were quantified using a spatio-temporal statistical method.

Results

Spatio-temporal analyses of ES dynamics illustrated that the supply of the three ES increased over the past 14 years in northern Shaanxi, where land cover dramatically changed owing to the wide-range ecological restoration projects. Our results also revealed that ES interactions varied across locations due to landscape heterogeneity and climate difference. In the arid and semi-arid area, synergies among ES (e.g., SC vs. WY) tended to dominate in grassland, while in artificial lands ES were prone to show trade-offs. In the semi-humid area, pairwise ES (e.g., NPP vs. WY) in woodland tended to present synergies.

Conclusions

The spatio-temporal variation of ES and their interactions resulted from coupling effect of human-induced climate and land-use change. In the long-term, spatially explicit quantification of ES interactions can help identify spatial heterogeneity in ES trade-offs and synergies, and inform regional targeted land-use policy adjustment and sustainable ecosystem management.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Lei Jiao and Feng Yang for providing helpful discussions about this work. We also appreciate constructive comments from two anonymous reviewers that greatly improved this manuscript. This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41601182), the National Key Research and Development Plan of China (2016YFC0501601), the Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education (15JJD790022), the National Social Science Foundation of China (14AZD094), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK201603078) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2016M592743).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Tourism and Environment College of Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710119, China

    Yingjie Li, Liwei Zhang, Junping Yan, Pengtao Wang & Ningke Hu

  2. Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida, Davie, FL, 33314, USA

    Jiangxiao Qiu

  3. School of Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510631, China

    Luwen Wan

  4. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Wei Cheng & Bojie Fu

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  1. Yingjie Li
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  2. Liwei Zhang
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  4. Junping Yan
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Correspondence to Liwei Zhang.

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Li, Y., Zhang, L., Qiu, J. et al. Spatially explicit quantification of the interactions among ecosystem services. Landscape Ecol 32, 1181–1199 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-017-0527-6

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Keywords

  • Multiple ecosystem services
  • Trade-off
  • Synergy
  • Temporal dynamics
  • Spatial heterogeneity
  • Partial correlation
  • LULC change
  • Loess Plateau