Ecosystem Services Assessment, Trade-Off, and Bundles in the Yellow River Basin, China

Abstract

Understanding ecosystem services(ESs)and their interactions will help to formulate effective and sustainable land use management plans, and clarifying the balance and synergy between watershed ecosystem services can provide a basis for the regulation of the ecological environment in different regions of the watershed and the maximization of overall ecological benefits. This paper takes the Yellow River Basin as the research object and uses the Ecosystem Services and Trade Offs (InVEST)model to evaluate the water yield (WY), soil conservation (SC), carbon storage (CS) and habitat quality (HQ) of the Yellow River Basin. The paper adopts the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA)model to evaluate the net primary productivity (NPP), draws the spatial distribution map of the five ecosystems, analyzes the trade-off and synergy between the five ecosystems using correlation and binary spatial correlation, and expresses it in space. In addition, it adopts self-organizing mapping (SOM) method to identify ecosystem service clusters. The results show that: (1) ES is generally higher in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and lower in the middle reaches. (2) WY and NPP, HQ, CS and WY are trade-off relationships, and other ecosystem services are synergistic relationships. Trade-offs and synergy show obvious spatial heterogeneity. (3) The ecosystem services of the Yellow River Basin, driven by different factors, can be divided into three areas, namely WY and SC service leading functional areas, HQ and CS service leading functional areas, and NPP service leading functional areas. Finally, it discusses the driving factors of the spatial heterogeneity of the balance of the ecosystem service functions of the Yellow River Basin and the suggestions of land use management in the basin.

Keywords

• ecosystem service bundles
• spatial distribution characteristics
• relatedness
• Yellow River Basin