Reliability Analysis and Cumulative Impact Assessment of Forest Ecosystem Services: A Case Study of Jilin Province, China

Abstract

Forests are an important source of ecosystem services, and they are a common link between economic value and environmental protection. Thus, it is of great significance to study forest ecosystem services. In previous studies, scholars have focused on the evaluation results of a single service component, but they did not consider the credibility of the data, which consisted of the cumulative effects of multiple components on forest ecosystem services. The current study examined the forest management plan for Jilin Province and used forest resource inventory data from China. Reliability analysis and cumulative impact assessment were used to overcome the problem of cumulative changes and interactions between services in order to make the evaluation results more objective and reasonable. The results showed that the resulting two values from the evaluation of forest ecosystem services had no obvious cumulative effect, and the evaluation value for overall reliability was 0.774, which confirms that the results have a certain credibility. The results of this study considered the cumulative effect of forest ecosystem services on the value evaluation. The total value of the service was equal to the sum of each service value, which might be primarily related to the data format and sample size used in this study. The innovation of this research lies in the consideration of data reliability and the cumulative influence of the services on the value evaluation process, which makes up for the shortcomings of previous service value evaluation methods. However, the limitation of this study is that multiple reference groups and control groups were not set up to verify that the inconsistency in the evaluation results was indeed due to the data format and sample size. Future research will focus on comparative studies of data types and sample sizes. Furthermore, future research will identify important service mechanisms and discuss the establishment of a forest ecological benefit compensation system to fundamentally solve the problems of power and mechanism associated with forest management, especially with respect to public welfare forests, in order to achieve a positive impact on the development of sustainable forestry in China.

Keywords

• Cumulative impact assessment (CIA)
• forest ecosystem services
• Jilin Province
• reliability analysis