Gray Forecast of Ecosystem Services Value and Its Driving Forces in Karst Areas of China: A Case Study in Guizhou Province, China

Abstract

A sound ecosystem is the prerequisite for the sustainable development of human society, and the karst ecosystem is a key component of the global ecosystem, which is essential to human welfare and livelihood. However, there remains a gap in the literature on the changing trend and driving factors of ecosystem services value (ESV) in karst areas. In this study, Guizhou Province, a representative region of karst mountainous areas, was taken as a case to bridge the gap. ESV in the karst areas was predicted, based on the land use change data in 2009–2018, and the driving mechanisms were explored through the gray correlation analysis method. Results show that a total loss of CNY 21.47 billion ESV from 2009 to 2018 is due to the conversion of a total of 22.566% of the land in Guizhou, with forest land as the main cause of ESV change. By 2025 and 2030, the areas of garden land, water area, and construction land in Guizhou Province will continue to increase, whereas the areas of cultivated land, forest land, and garden land will decline. The total ESV shows a downward trend and will decrease to CNY 218.71 billion by 2030. Gray correlation analysis results illuminate that the total population and tertiary industry proportion are the uppermost, among all the driving factors that affect ESV change. The findings in this study have important implications for optimizing and adjusting the land use structure ecological protection and will enrich the literature on ESV in ecologically fragile areas.

Spatio-temporal evolution and trend prediction of urban ecosystem service value based on CLUE-S and GM (1,1) compound model

“…GM (1,1) may differentiate between the various degrees of development trends shown by system factors, as well as produce and analyze the original data to derive the system evolution law, and then establish a gray model to forecast the system while taking into account undefinable variables (Pan et al, 2021 ), which is widely used in the evaluation and decision-making of economy (Yuan & Chen, 2016 ), geography (Wang & Cao, 2021a , b ), ecology (Chen et al, 2020 ), and other fields. This study is used to forecast the trend of three indicators of socio-economic development level: GDP, Engel’s coefficient, and urban population ratio.…”

“…Since Costanza et al put forward and used this method in 1997 to comprehensively evaluate the value of 17 kinds of ecosystem services in the world (Costanza et al, 1997 ), scholars have used or improved this method to compute the ecosystem service values (ESV) (Costanza et al, 2014 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ) and obtained a series of research results (Yu, 2021 ). In China, Xie et al ( 2008 ), based on the research of Costanza et al ( 1997 ), through expert consultation and a willingness survey of more than 700 ecologists, constructed the “Equivalent Scale of China's Terrestrial Ecosystem Services Value,” which was consistent with China’s regional characteristics and the actual development, and achieved a large number of applications (Pan et al, 2021 ; Wu et al, 2020 ; Xue & Ma, 2018 ). Specifically, scholars have extensively analyzed the spatial and temporal distributions and the drivers of ESV based on the ecosystem service value equivalence scale at the national (Yuan et al, 2019a , b ), watershed (Hou et al, 2021 ), and provincial scales (Zhang et al, 2020a ), and explored the impacts of human activities on ESV by combining the concepts of landscape pattern, ecological compensation, and ecological risk.…”

The Response of Carbon Stocks to Land Use/Cover Change and a Vulnerability Multi-Scenario Analysis of the Karst Region in Southern China Based on PLUS-InVEST

“…In Figure 12, the largest contribution to forest land is provided with the DEM, with a contribution of more than 0.12. The landscape of Guizhou Province is mostly mountainous and hilly, accounting for 92.50% of the province's area, and the basin area only covers 7.50% of the land, with large changes in topographic relief [8,81]. The topography has become a major factor affecting the expansion of forest land.…”

“…The karst plateau mountainous region of Guizhou is the center of the ecologically fragile karst area in southern China and is also an important ecological barrier in the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Pearl River Basins [6]. In recent years, with the rapid socioeconomic development and accelerated urbanization of the area [7], the land use landscape pattern in Guizhou Province has changed dramatically, causing greater disturbance to the terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle and affecting the service function of the ecosystem, which will make the ecological problems faced by the fragile ecological environment of the karst plateau mountainous area more prominent [8].…”

Spatiotemporal Variation in Ecosystem Health and Its Driving Factors in Guizhou Province

“…In recent decades, owing to China's Western Development Strategy, Guizhou Province has experienced rapid economic and population growth [57]. However, these developments have caused significant landscape changes, exerted substantial pressure on the ecosystem, and severely jeopardized the region's ability for sustainable ecological development [58], leading to issues such as rocky desertification and soil erosion [59,60]. Hence, investigating ecosystem health in this region and implementing effective measures to improve the environmental situation are essential.…”