The impact of urbanization and climate change on ecosystem services: A case study of the city belt along the Yellow River in Ningxia, China

Abstract

Urbanization, an unavoidable global process, has driven land use change, impacted ecosystem services, and induced serious environmental problems. As a result, urban planning is a critical issue in sustainable development. In this study, we developed a framework to quantify how urbanization influences ecosystem services (ESs) in order to provide suggestions for urban planning during large scale urban agglomeration in northwestern China. We separated the region into three sub-regions (developed urban, developing urban, and rural areas), quantified five critical ESs (crop production, carbon storage, nutrient retention, sand fixation, and habitat quality), analyzed the relationships (trade-off, synergy, and bundle) among ES changes, and investigated the impacts of urbanization on these ESs. The results show that urbanization results in large scale reclamation and small scale deforestation in rural areas; it comprehensively results in an increase of four ESs (not habitat quality). Urban expansion mainly occurs in developing urban areas and causes a decrease in four ESs (not sand fixation). Based on temporal change in ESs, synergy relationships exist among them, except for between nutrient retention and crop production, which have an insignificant correlation. Urban expansion would strengthen the synergy relationships among regulating services, while green infrastructure in core urban areas would weaken these relationships. Based on the spatial distribution of ES change, two bundles were identified among the five ESs: 1) crop production, carbon storage, and nutrient retention; and 2) sand fixation and habitat quality. Based on these findings, several suggestions for urban expansion and land use planning are proposed to achieve an optimized balance between urbanization and ES protection. Investigating the impacts of rapid urbanization on ESs and their relationships could provide scientifically based suggestions for urban planning according to ES protection, sustainable urban development, and human well-being.

An Integrated CNN Model for Reconstructing and Predicting Land Use/Cover Change: A Case Study of the Baicheng Area, Northeast China

“…Land use and land cover change (LUCC) is an area of study that examines the relationship between human economic activities and ecology and helps explain these interactions [1][2][3]. LUCC is an important driving force that substantially affects the operation of Earth systems and has been widely applied to fields including ecosystem service assessment, desertification monitoring, and forest inventory [4][5][6].…”

Scales and Historical Evolution: Methods to Reveal the Relationships between Ecosystem Service Bundles and Socio-Ecological Drivers—A Case Study of Dalian City, China

“…LUI and UR are the key pressures of the urban social ecosystem; land-use change will have an important impact on the evolution of ES bundles. Understanding how land-use changes affect the relationships between ESs is a prerequisite condition for future coastal area planning and land-use management [ 7 , 62 , 63 ]. From 2005 to 2015, rapid urbanization has strongly affected the land coverage in the study area.…”

“…A major challenge in ecosystem management is to cope with the conflicts between multiple ecosystem services (ESs) in complex socio-ecological systems [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. This is because ESs are not independent and interact in complex ways [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. ES bundles refer to “a collection of multiple ESs that co-occur in space and time” [ 3 , 10 , 11 ].…”

“…The relationships among multiple ESs are often affected by socio-economic and environmental factors, such as climate [ 27 ], urbanization rate [ 28 ], and land-use change [ 7 ]. Some scholars have discussed the formation mechanism of the nexus among varied ESs from the perspective of driving factors.…”

Identification of Coupling and Influencing Factors between Urbanization and Ecosystem Services in Guanzhong, China

“…Urbanization and human activities have gradually changed the structure of ecosystems (e.g., vegetation cover, land use, etc.) as well as their processes (e.g., species decline), transforming natural ecosystems into coupled human-nature ecosystems [13][14][15][16].…”