Mountainous landscapes are particularly vulnerable and sensitive to climate change and human activities, and a clear understanding of how ecosystem services (ES) and their relationships continuously change over time, across space, and along altitude is therefore essential for ecosystem management. Chongqing, a typical mountainous region, was selected to assess the long-term changes in its key ES and their relationships. From 1992 to 2018, the temporal variation in water yield (WY) revealed that the maximum and minimum WYs occurred in 1998 and 2006, which coincided with El Niño-Southern Oscillation and severe drought events, respectively. Soil export (SE) and WY were consistent with precipitation, which reached their highest values in 1998. During this period, carbon storage (CS) and habitat quality (HQ) both decreased significantly. ES in Chongqing showed large variations in altitude. Generally, WY and SE decreased with increasing altitude, while CS and HQ increased. For spatial distribution, WY and SE showed positive trends in the west and negative trends in the east. In regard to CS and HQ, negative trends dominated the area. Persistent tradeoffs between WY and soil conservation (SC) were found at all altitude gradients. The strong synergies between CS and HQ were maintained over time.
Wetlands are considered as one of the most important ecosystems on the Earth. Rapidly urbanizing, being an intense way of human activities, has brought significant impact on the ecological functions of urban wetlands. This study focused on the urban wetland ecosystem in the Nanjing Jiangbei New Area, China, and presented a dynamic integrated approach to assess the monetized value of its services. A classification decision tree model was adopted to interpret the Landsat TM/ETM/OLI images to obtain the LUCC data of urban wetlands in different years. Then an integrated approach was employed to correct the equivalent values and their prices of various ecosystem services, dynamically evaluating the value of wetland ecosystem services. The results showed that the overall value of the wetland ecosystem services of the Jiangbei New Area was 893.99 million USD, 1365.63 million USD and 1016.46 million USD in 2002, 2009 and 2015, respectively. Among the service categories, the regulating service reaches the most and the provisioning service contributes the least to the total value. According to the analysis of annual valuation results, it was inevitable that the ecological conditions of wetlands in the rapidly urbanizing area would deteriorate and the capability to provide ecosystem services would degenerate. This research suggests that rapid urban development should adopt an ecosystem service oriented strategy to align sustainable utilization with conservation and to recognize the interaction between the wetland ecosystem services and the forces of urbanization.
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