Responses of Ecosystem Services to Urbanization-Induced Land Use Changes in Ecologically Sensitive Suburban Areas in Hangzhou, China

Abstract

Ecologically sensitive suburban areas provide important ecosystem services and protect urban ecological security because of their multiple functions in natural and human systems. The research on the ecological environment effects of land use activities in ecologically sensitive suburban areas is important in guiding the healthy and sustainable development of cities. Taking the west suburbs of Hangzhou in China as a case study, we quantified land use changes from Landsat satellite imagery and calculated the value of ecosystem services using the well-established equivalent factor table for land use/cover change (LUCC) and ecosystem services value (ESV). The impacts of LUCC on the ecological environment were analyzed using the transfer matrix of land use and coefficient of elasticity. Results revealed the following. (1) The total ESV in the western suburban area of Hangzhou decreased from $109.95 million in 2000 to $87.09 million in 2016. Moreover, the ESV of gas regulation, climate regulation, soil formation and protection, as well as biodiversity conservation presented a large decrease of more than 25%, especially between 2010 and 2016. (2) The spatial distribution of ESV was high in the west and low in the east. The regions with a significant reduction in ESV were mainly distributed in the eastern town of Wuchang and in Jincheng Town located in the midwest valley. (3) Industrial agglomeration activities in the ecologically sensitive suburban area emerged as the primary factor influencing ESV for various land uses. The elasticity indicator for assessing the responses to ESV changes relative to LUCC showed that 1% of the land conversion in this area resulted in average changes in ESV of 4.1% after the establishment of the industrial agglomeration area. (4) The increase in construction land was associated with a significant decrease in forest area because of the policy of cultivated land requisition–compensation balance and development strategies for low-slope hilly lands. Consequently, the ESV in the ecologically sensitive suburban areas rapidly declined.

Analysis and Prediction of Ecosystem Service Values Based on Land Use/Cover Change in the Yiluo River Basin

“…Secondly, we set the value of the equivalent coefficients, which can be equivalent to one-seventh of the economic value of food production per hectare per year refer to existing research [14,40]. Where one-seventh means that the economic value provided by natural ecosystems without human input, which is approximately equal to one-seventh of the economic value of the food production provided by existing farmland.…”

Effect of Urban Fringes Green Space Fragmentation on Ecosystem Service Value

“…To clarify the degree of dependence of the ecological service value on the change of the value coe cient and test the impact of the adjusted value equivalent factor on the evaluation of the ecological service value Yuan et al 2019;Wang et al 2017), this paper uses the concept of elasticity coe cient to calculate the sensitivity index of the ecological service value to the value coe cient and further determine the value of the accuracy of the coe cient. The coe cient of sensitivity formula is as follows:…”

“…The ecological service functions of the green space system includes the adjustment function of purifying soil water bodies, maintaining carbon and oxygen balance, adjusting local climate, and alleviating urban "heat island effect" (Calderón-Contreras & Quiroz-Rosas 2017; ; maintain the functions of beautifying the urban landscape, such as biodiversity (Huang et al 2019) and the richness of the landscape (Cai et al 2017); meet the daily leisure and entertainment, science education, cultural exchanges, and other functions of recreation and cultural creation of the urban population (Zhang et al 2018), and the production function (Dou et al 2019). Conducting research on the evaluation of ecological service value of urban green space system, is conducive to people deeply understanding the role of urban green space vegetation, to select and con gure green space green plants more scienti cally and rationally, promote urban green space system planning, and provide scienti c basis for urban ecological construction (Huang et al 2019;Jaung et al 2019;Yuan et al 2019). Scholars take the urban green space system as the research object, and classify the composition and structure of the urban green space system , service functions , landscape pattern evolution (Sun et al 2019), ecological effects (Liu et al 2018), green space ecological service value evaluation methods (Costanza et al 1997;, and other levels are the research perspective (Tolessa et al 2017), which summarizes the relevant research on the evaluation of urban green space system ecological services.…”

Analysis of the Impact of Built Environment on Coastline Ecosystem Services and Values

“…thereafter their monetary values were obtained through the application of ES values equivalences from (Costanza et al, 1997). Despite several existing methods for ES valuation (Neugarten et al, 2018), the ESVf in Table 3, which is an extract from (Costanza et al, 1997) and (Yuan et al, 2019) has been instrumental in understanding the cost of LULC conversion. Equation 4 provides both the relation between ESVf and LULC data as well as the approach to compute the monetary value of the lost ES from 1995 to 2016;…”

“…Recently, recognition, quantification and performance of ES in Anthropocene epoch has grown tremendously (Thomson and Newman, 2018;Zari, 2019), albeit ongoing global debate on urban biodiversity and its involvement in ES production and supply (Gómez-Baggethun & Barton, 2013;Hurley & Emery, 2018). Earliest work on ES studies by Costanza et al (1997) set a stage on ES valuation proxies; today, literature reveals three approaches to ES valuation; willingness to pay (WTP), LULCC based methods and ecological process-benefit assessments (Yuan et al, 2019). According to Hepelwa (2013) and Schmidt et al (2016) technological advancement in remote sensing (RS) and geographical information system (GIS) has efficiently improved LULCC based evaluation methods as compared to the others.…”