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Mapping the hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services in conservation priority setting

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Abstract

Spatial-explicitly mapping of the hotspots and coldspots is a vital link in the priority setting for ecosystem services (ES) conservation. However, little research has identified and tested the compactness and efficiency of their ES hotspots and coldspots, which may weaken the effectiveness of ecological conservation. In this study, based on the RUSLE model and Getis-Ord Gi* statistics, we quantified the variation of annual soil conservation services (SC) and identified the statistically significant hotspots and coldspots in Shaanxi Province of China from 2000 to 2013. The results indicate that, 1) areas with high SC presented a significantly increasing trend as well, while areas with low SC only changed slightly; 2) SC hotspots and coldspots showed an obvious spatial differentiation—the hotspots were mainly spatially aggregated in southern Shaanxi, while the coldspots were mainly distributed in the Guanzhong Basin and Sand-windy Plateau; and 3) the identified hotspots had the highest capacity of providing SC, with 29.6% of the total area providing 59.7% of the total service. In contrast, the coldspots occupied 46.3% of the total area, but only provided 17.2% of the total SC. In addition to conserving single ES, the Getis-Ord Gi* statistics method can also help identify multi-functional priority areas for conserving multiple ES and biodiversity.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive advice about the paper, and we also thank Chen Guoyong from the Hunan University, who provided important aid in calculating the annual soil conservation of Shaanxi by MATLAB programming.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

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

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

    Wei Cheng & Bojie Fu

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  1. Yingjie Li
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Correspondence to Liwei Zhang.

Additional information

Foundation: National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41601182; National Social Science Foundation of China, No.14AZD094; National Key Research and Development Plan of China, No.2016YFC0501601; China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, No.2016M592743; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, No.GK201603078; Key Project of the Ministry of Education of China, No.15JJD790022

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Li, Y., Zhang, L., Yan, J. et al. Mapping the hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services in conservation priority setting. J. Geogr. Sci. 27, 681–696 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11442-017-1400-x

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