Ecosystem services help alleviate the intensity of dryness/wetness

Abstract

Dryness/wetness extremes are likely to become more frequent and more severe in the future in the context of climate change. Ecosystems provide multiple services, such as food production, water supply, biodiversity conservation, carbon fixation, air quality improvement, and other services. Therefore, they have the potential to mitigate the destructive effects of extreme weather events. Ecosystems with high service values are thought to be able to alleviate the intensity of dryness/wetness. Although this issue has gained increasing attention, the quantitative relationship between ecosystem services and the intensity of weather extremes is still unknown. The aim of this study is quantifying such relationship and the contribution of ecosystem services and their components to the reduction in weather intensities. Spearman’s correlations analysis, a redundancy analysis, and variation partitioning based on three datasets for China and at the global scale were employed. The results indicated that ecosystem services generally decrease the intensity of dryness/wetness extremes, and these effects vary across climate types and ecosystem service components. Therefore, if it is possible to increase ecosystem service values, the intensity of dryness/wetness extremes at the local, regional and global scales can be reasonably alleviated.

Keywords

• Ecosystem services
• Extreme weather
• Dryness and wetness
• Weather regulation
• Extreme alleviation