Elsevier

Ecosystem Services

Volume 48, April 2021, 101252
Ecosystem Services

Full Length Article
Mapping changes in the value of ecosystem services in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis, China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2021.101252Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Ecosystem services value(ESV) of the study area decreased by 3.8 billion USD from 2000 to 2015.

  • Experts’ opinions were integrated into the localisation of ecosystem services value.

  • Cold spots intensified while hot spots diminished across the study area.

  • Nonlinear relationship between an area's ESV and its location was found.

  • The decrease in ESV was found mainly due to a decrease in cultivated land.

Abstract

Spatio-temporal dynamics and stakeholder engagement are critical components in the assessment of ecosystem services to support well-targeted and localised strategies for sustainable ecosystem management. Here, we investigated the recent changing pattern of ecosystem services’ value (ESV) in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis (YRMRM) - a region of vital economic and ecological importance in central China. Local experts’ opinions on the regional importance of different ecosystem services were acquired from an extensive survey and integrated into the localisation of ESV. We explored the shifting extents of the hot and cold spots of ESV and whether the ESV of a place could be related to its geographical location and distance. Our results showed a downtrend of ESV from 2000 to 2015, resulting from a loss in cultivated land and thereby a reduced ESV of the food supply. Cold spots intensified while hot spots diminished across the YRMRM. The ESVs of a place were distance-decay functions of the distances (d) between the place to the nearest provincial centre, lake and the Yangtze River. The maximum ESV was usually located at 42 km away from nearest provincial centre, 10 km away from the Yangtze River, and near the lake. This study adds important first-hand empirical data to the field of the stakeholder-driven valuation of localised ESV. Our results based on a comprehensive spatiotemporal assessment of ESV is conducive to promoting the coordination of sustainable development and ecological protection in YRMRM.

Introduction

Ecosystems provides a multitude of services fundamental to human survival, health, and well-being (Guerry et al., 2015, Kindu et al., 2016). Ecosystem services (ES), which are defined as the benefits humans obtain from nature, are declining in approximately 60% of the world’s ecosystems over the past five decades (MEA, 2005). The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) also found that the capacity of nature to support quality of life has declined for 14 of the 18 categories over the past 50 years (Díaz et al., 2019). Ecosystem services value (ESV) offers opportunities for both environmental managers and the general public to understand the potential benefits from ecosystems in a direct and intuitive way. Sutton et al. (2016) estimated that the world had lost $6.3 trillion per year of ecosystem services’ value (ESV) due to land degradation. A rapid increase in population, excessive consumption of resources and pollution continue having significant and sometimes destructive effects on the biophysical environment, resulting in rapid degradation of ecosystems’ functions and services (Sutton et al., 2016, McDonough et al., 2017). People who live in highly developed areas were reported to have higher demands for ES (Lautenbach et al., 2019). ESV is therefore regarded as a useful tool for raising people’s environmental protection awareness and providing information and scientific basis for ecological conservation practices.

The research on ESV assessment has received tremendous attention since the end of last century (Costanza et al., 1997) and made great progress in gaining support for environmental protection form both stakeholders and the general public (Rode et al., 2017). A global meta-analysis on the valuation of ESV suggested that monetary valuation outcomes were largely determined by the selected methodology (Schild et al., 2018). Existing methods for ESV often varied geographically as they involved ecosystems with different sensitivity to environmental changes and vulnerability to hazards and stakeholders from different sectors and, thus, have diverse preferences (Martín-López et al., 2014). Current assessments on ESV mainly take into consideration the biophysical and monetary value of ESs (Frélichová et al., 2014, Harrison et al., 2018). However they lack a socio-cultural perspective and, thus, can not adequately capture the full spectrum of its potential value (Scholte et al., 2015). Ecosystem service socio-cultural value involves culture, people’s perception et al. (Krause et al., 2017), lacking local detailed data and unified indicators (Lau et al., 2018, Sun et al., 2019). Experts’ opinion method may serve as a tool to comprehensively remedy the hard-to-get basic data information (Jacobs et al., 2015). Therefore, an integrated method that capture above character (i.e., ecological, economic and socio-cultural factors) can reflect the local stakeholder perception and real situation of ecosystem, which is beneficial to practical implementation of ecological planning and management.

The mapping of ES is useful for policy and decision making, as it could aid setting priorities to support well-targeted strategies at the local scale (Malinga et al., 2015). For example, Yang et al. (2018) explored the spatiotemporal variation of green space’s ESV on Ganjingzi District in Dalian, China for better construction practices in the city. Xie et al. (2017) mapped the dynamic ESV changes at province level in China. Regional and local ESV map with high resolution is on a growing demand. In addition, increasing attention has been paid on exploring how ES have changed across an area using spatial analytical approaches such the ‘hot-spot’ and ‘cold-spot’ statistics. These improved decision-makers’ ability to prioritize budgetary resources and optimize the spatial planning of land. However, hot-spot and cold-spot of ESV changes are poorly characterized in China (Li et al., 2016b). For decision-makers, identifying hot-spot and cold-spot areas of ESV can provide quantitative information of testing the effect of implementing related policies and programs for ecological conservation and adjusting the direction of programs in the future.

The Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis (YRMRM) in central China is an important region with high level of biodiversity. The value of ES were previously found to be high in Hubei and around Poyang Lake in this region (Li et al., 2014, Li et al., 2016b). With the national plans of “The Rise of Central China Plan”, an important national economic development policy stablished in 2006 (Zhang et al., 2018a), it has become one of the most important Chinese economic centres. In 2017, the Chinese government has released an eco-environmental protection plan for the Yangtze River Economic Belt to protect the country’s largest river basin from degradation (Chen et al., 2017), which resulted in a higher demand for ecosystem services. Unfortunately, urban expansion and the reduction of cultivated land, woodland, marshland has led to a severe decline in the region’s ES (Li et al., 2016a, Zhang et al., 2018b, Zhang et al., 2020a, Wu et al., 2019, Zheng et al., 2020). In many cases, ESV would decline with economic and population growth (Luo and Zhang, 2014, Su et al., 2014), while a resource-based county with a wealthier economy had high ESV such as Golmud in Qinghai (Li et al., 2016b). The conflict between urban development and environmental protection is significant in YRMRM. A spatially explicit ecosystem services valuation will help for targeted spatial planning and management of ecosystem.

In this study, we aimed to seek answers to the following three questions: (i) How to comprehensively integrate biophysical, monetary and socio-cultural value into ESV in YRMRM? (ii) What was the spatial distribution of ESV especially around cities and water sources? (iii) Where are areas of high and low value of ecosystem services, and how they changed? We applied an integrated method for the spatial valuation of ES by considering the fine level composition of landscape and local importance of ES derived based on stakeholders’ opinions. The ESV was then mapped and analysed using hot and cold spot statistics to depict the spatiotemporal dynamics of ES over the YRMRM. Our results were focused on improving the comparability (i.e., cross-case comparisons) and application of ESV results, which could provide more information and scientific basis for the protection, utilization, planning and management of ecosystems.

Section snippets

Study area

The Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis (YRMRM) covers Wuhan metropolitan area, Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan area, and Poyang Lake metropolitan area. Located in the central part of China, it consists of 31 prefecture-level cities and 229 counties in Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces (Fig. 1). The extent of the YRMRM was about 326,100 km2, with a total population of 125 million and a regional gross product of 7.90 trillion CNY (1.21 trillion USD with an exchange rate of 0.153 in

Ecosystem services value of the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis

The total ESV over the YRMRM showed an increasing trend between 2000 to 2010 (from 137.9 to 142.8 billion USD) before decreased to 141.7 billion USD in 2015. The mean ESV per unit area in YRMRM were 3940, 4071, 4082, 4051 USD/ha in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015, respectively. The maximum ESV per unit area showed a remarkable increase from 33,163 in 2000 to 154,859 USD/ha in 2015 respectively (Fig. 2). Areas with high ESV (red area in Fig. 2) were mostly distributed along the urban fringe (e.g.,

Discussion

Benefit-transfer method (assuming a constant unit value per hectare of a given ecosystem type multiplied by the area of each type to arrive at an aggregate total) can quickly estimate the economic value of a particular ecosystem in less time and at a lower cost than with a primary survey. It is both widely utilised and widely criticized (Plummer, 2009). For example, Costanza et al. (1997) estimated the global ESV, and updated it in 2014 (Costanza et al., 2014). Xie et al. (2017) modified and

Conclusion

An integrated method using expert opinions and biophysical factors was developed in this study to localise Costanza’s global unit value for fine-scale estimation of ESV. Our results showed a downward trend of ESV in YRMRM from 2000 to 2015, resulting from a loss in cultivated land and thereby a reduced ESV of the food supply (occupied 34% of the total ESV). Projected diminished hot spots and intensified cold spots of ESV shed light on the ecological important regions on which policy priorities

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestive comments that helped to improve the quality of the manuscript. This work is financially supported by the Innovative Foundation of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Grant No. 2018KFYYXJJ133).

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