Potential impact of land use change on ecosystem services in China

Abstract

Land use change can greatly alter spatial pattern and overall ecosystem service values (ESV). The goal of this study was to explore the likely effects of land use change on ESV in China. In this paper, the spatially explicit land use changes across China from 2010 to 2020 under the 2000s trend scenario and the planning scenario were projected using the Dyna-CLUE model. The ESV evaluation method was improved by adjusting the ESV coefficients using biomass data to reduce the generalization error of proxy-based method. The results revealed that between 2010 and 2020, total ESV increased by 1798 and 2215 billion RMB a −1 under the 2000s trend scenario and the planning scenario, respectively. The spatial pattern of ESV in 2010 and 2020 presented a logical geographic distribution. The areas with ESV of 50,000 RMB ha −1 a −1 and higher occurred primarily in northeastern and southern China, while the areas with ESV of 5000 RMB ha −1 a −1 and lower were mainly located in northwestern China. The spatial differences between the two scenarios were insignificant except that the increase of ESV in southwestern China was more prominent in the planning scenario than that in the 2000s trend scenario, while the total ESV in 2020 under the planning scenario was larger than that in the 2000s trend scenario. The increase of ESV occurred mainly in northeastern, southern, and southeastern China due to forest growth and woodland expansion in 2020 compared with 2010. The results of this study can provide useful information for the public and land managers to consider.

Variations of Ecosystem Service Value in Response to Land-Use Change in the Kashgar Region, Northwest China

“…The "reform and opening up policy", implemented in China in 1978, generated impressive expansion of cultivated lands, significantly altering the land structure [49]. Along with the "China market economy policy" enacted in 1992, tremendous LULCC occurred in the study area, especially where natural resources were available for the expansion of cultivated lands [50].…”

Spatial multi-scale relationships of ecosystem services: A case study using a geostatistical methodology

“…Identifying the factors that influence ES is a key step in understanding the spatial scale dependence of ES relationships and essential to managing multiple ES to improve ecosystem functions 31 , 32 . Nevertheless, the drivers of ES supply are complex, and the mechanisms underlying ES relationships are not straightforward 6 , 12 , 33 . Biophysical and socio-economic factors can be considered the main types of drivers that affect the spatial heterogeneity of ES 12 .…”

Impact of land use land cover changes on ecosystem service value – A case study of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao in South China

“…Several studies have been performed to monitor the impact of LULC changes on the structure and functions of ESV in numerous regions of China [4,10,18,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and around the world [15,25,28,29,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Due to LULC changes and urbanization, most of these studies showed moderate to significant decrease in ESV [15,16,28,29,41,43] while others found almost no change [46].…”