Ecosystems provide human multiple types of ecosystem services in the aspects of natural resources and living environment, and all these services are crucial foundation of sustainable social and economic development. However, between the understanding of ecosystem services and practice of management, there exist great challenges which contain: quantifying ecosystem services, relationships among multiple services, multi鄄scale correlation of services, combination of ecosystem services and policy design. In response to these challenges, researches of ecosystem services management in recent years have focused on fields as follow: quantitative estimate of ecosystem services, relationship between ecosystem services and human well鄄being, trade鄄offs among multiple ecosystem services, conservation planning of ecosystem services and mechanisms of payments for ecosystem services. With the goal to promote ecosystem services management practices, we should: further strengthen the theoretical research about provision of ecosystem services, develop more methods to display results of services research, carry out more interdisciplinary studies with sociology, economics, demography, search for practicable and reasonable approach to incorporating ecosystem services into decision鄄making.
Ecological compensation institution plays a key role in promoting ecological protection and coordinating regional development. However, how to establishing effective and operational ecological compensation framework is still a great challenge. We summarized the ecological compensation practices in China and analyzed their problem, including lack of systematic institution design, deficient participation of stakeholders, lacking for scientific identification of ecological compensation scope, lower ecological compensation standards and absent supervision mechanism. Finally, the following strategies for ecological compensation institution establishment were put forward: fundamental principle for establishing ecological compensation institution, scientific definition of compensatory scope, identification of the compensatory carrier and object, building scientific method for compensatory standard accounting, and corresponding policy measures.
Anthropogenic modifications of river systems mainly happen in riparian ecosystem, especially in the flora. It is well鄄known that alterations of the hydrological regime and its interactions with natural environmental parameters determine the riparian vegetation composition. This study was conducted in riparian zone of the Yongding鄄Haihe river system, which is about 270 km long, with a drain catchment about 3600 km 2 , strongly anthropogenically impacted river flowing into the capital Beijing and Tianjin, China. Several sections of this river have been dried鄄out for several years due to water abstraction in the catchment. Streambed elevation ranges from 10 m to 300 m (above the sea level). The study area is characterized by a semi鄄arid continental climate in the warm temperate zone and has an annual temperature of 12-13 毅C. The long鄄term mean annual precipitation ranges from 400 to 600 mm. It is dominated by the Asian summer monsoon from July to September that accounts for about 70% of annual precipitation. This study aims to identify the flora characteristics of riparian vegetation in Yongding鄄Haihe river system and the differences of flora between three river sections. Plant composition has been surveyed in 17 experimental sites along Yongding鄄Haihe river system. 5 sites were selected in the mountain section and 5 sites were selected in Haihe section, other 7 sites were located in the plain section. In each site, we used transect to set plots following the line from riverside to the highland, the distance is 5 m between two plots nearby. In this study, the size of herb plots is 1m伊1m, while 5 m伊5 m for shrub plots and 10m 伊 10m for tree plots, which are typical sampling sizes for vegetation survey in Northern China. The native plants and alien plants have been also indentified from the species list in each plot based on the Flora of China and Flora of Beijing. The flora composition of the entire river and different river sections were analyzed. In order to better
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.