Understanding Relationships among Agro-Ecosystem Services Based on Emergy Analysis in Luancheng County, North China

Abstract

Exploring the relationship between different services has become the focus of ecosystem services research in recent years. The agro-ecosystem, which accounts for one-third of the global land area, provides lots of services but also disservices, depending on resources provided by other systems. In this paper, we explored the agro-ecosystem from four aspects: a summary of different indicators in the agro-ecosystem, input and output changes with time, relationships between different ecosystem services and disservices, and resource contribution to major services, using Luancheng County of North China as the study area. We then used emergy analysis to unify all the indicators. The conclusions were that the agro-ecosystem maintained provisioning and regulating services but with increasing volatility under continued growth in production inputs and disservice outputs. There was a positive correlation between most of the different services and disservices. Rainfall and groundwater resources were the most used input resources in the agro-ecosystem and all other major ecosystem services depended directly on them.

Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action

“…They conclude that the integrated approach is suggested as a tool to design future scenarios of resource-use and ecological efficiency, and that the result of socio-economic metabolism analysis implies that more efforts should be made to promote the efficiency of resource utilization and to optimize natural resource use [21]. In contrast, Ma, Eneji, and Liu explored the agro-ecosystem, according to the results based on Emergy Analysis, they conclude that the agro-ecosystem maintained provisioning and regulating services but with an increasing volatility under continued growth in production inputs and disservice outputs [22]. Lu et al developed an integrated model by combining an assessment index system, assessment model, and GIS approach, and successfully applied this model to investigate the temporal-spatial characters and the trends of the sustainable development degree in Loess Plateau Ecologically Fragile of China [23].…”