Landscape Fragmentation and Ecosystem Services: A Reply to Andrieu et al.

Spatial heterogeneity of ecosystem services in response to landscape patterns under the Grain for Green Program: A case‐study in Kaihua County, China

“…In addition, the connectivity between forest land patches also contributes to improving the ES (Figure 6). This is because isolated vegetation landscapes patches have a negative effect on the movement of matter, and large vegetation patches can capture more sediments and nutrients to promote SR and WP (Mitchell et al, 2015). Our results show that the effect of landscape aggregation on ES is smaller than that of landscape diversity, probably because landscape diversity is closely related to the type and number of landscape components, while landscape aggregation is not necessarily related to the type and number of landscape components.…”

“…GD showed that MPS was the dominant factor affecting WY and SR (Table 6), with a negative influence on WY and a positive effect on SR (Figure S2 inhibit the movement of matter (Mitchell et al, 2015). GFGP leads to the interspersed distribution of forest land and cropland, which leads to the fragmentation of forest land and cropland (Table 4).…”

“…Landscape pattern refers to the spatial arrangement and combination of landscape elements with different types, sizes and shapes (Turner, 1987;Turner, 1990), which influence ES through ecosystem components, structures, and ecological processes (Mitchell et al, 2015;Yohannes et al, 2021). The two key characteristics of landscape patterns are landscape connectivity and fragmentation, which play important roles in ES change by changing the landscape compositions and configurations (Botzas-Coluni et al, 2021;Xia et al, 2021;Yushanjiang et al, 2018).…”