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Impacts of land management on ecosystem service delivery in the Baiyangdian river basin

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Abstract

As the largest freshwater lake in northern China, Lake Baiyangdian provides a diversity of ecosystem services: it guarantees water flow to a number of beneficiaries and is an important component of sustainable regional development. However, the flows of sustainable ecosystem services from Lake Baiyangdian mainly depend on upstream hydrological and nutrient retention functions. For sustainable land management, it is important to explore the implications of upstream land-use changes by humans on the ecosystem services supplied by Lake Baiyangdian. In this study, ecological assets and hydrological time series were analysed, and the InVEST model was used to investigate the implications of land management on the delivery of ecosystem services. The results showed that significant changes in ecological assets occurred in the Baiyangdian river basin during the period 1980–2007, characterised particularly by an increase in forested area and a decline in wetland area. A significant decline in the ecological status of the Baiyangdian river basin, expressed as an abrupt change in stream flow time series 1970–2011, was also noted. Water yield and surface run-off functions were mainly influenced by precipitation, but changes in land-cover patterns exacerbate the impacts of these two factors. Nutrient retention was influenced more by altered land cover than by precipitation. Due to data gaps, it was not possible to link upstream ecosystem functions to the ecosystem services contributed by Lake Baiyangdian. It will be necessary to establish a long-term ecological monitoring programme in order to gather the data needed to gain a deeper understanding of the interconnections between ecosystem function and services. The ultimate aim of such a programme must be to incorporate ecosystem services into ecosystem management and policy-making.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Science and Technology Service Network Initiative Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KFJ-EW-ZY-004), National Natural Science Foundation of China (41371538, 41501580). We thank editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and critical comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Applied Ecology, Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, Shanghai, 200233, China

    Yang Bai

  2. Changjiang Water Resources Protection Institute, Wuhan, 430051, China

    Bo Jiang & Xiaoyuan Wang

  3. Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar

    Juha M. Alatalo

  4. Guangdong Provincial Academy of Environmental Science, Guangzhou, 510045, China

    Changwei Zhuang

  5. Institute of Wetland Research, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing, 100091, China

    Lijuan Cui

  6. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, People’s Republic of China

    Weihua Xu

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  1. Yang Bai
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  2. Bo Jiang
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  3. Juha M. Alatalo
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  4. Changwei Zhuang
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  5. Xiaoyuan Wang
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  7. Weihua Xu
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Correspondence to Weihua Xu.

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Bai, Y., Jiang, B., Alatalo, J.M. et al. Impacts of land management on ecosystem service delivery in the Baiyangdian river basin. Environ Earth Sci 75, 258 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4831-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4831-7

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