Climate-dependence of ecosystem services in a nature reserve in northern China

Abstract

Evaluation of ecosystem services has become a hotspot in terms of research focus, but uncertainties over appropriate methods remain. Evaluation can be based on the unit price of services (services value method) or the unit price of the area (area value method). The former takes meteorological factors into account, while the latter does not. This study uses Kunyu Mountain Nature Reserve as a study site at which to test the effects of climate on the ecosystem services. Measured data and remote sensing imagery processed in a geographic information system were combined to evaluate gas regulation and soil conservation, and the influence of meteorological factors on ecosystem services. Results were used to analyze the appropriateness of the area value method. Our results show that the value of ecosystem services is significantly affected by meteorological factors, especially precipitation. Use of the area value method (which ignores the impacts of meteorological factors) could considerably impede the accuracy of ecosystem services evaluation. Results were also compared with the valuation obtained using the modified equivalent value factor (MEVF) method, which is a modified area value method that considers changes in meteorological conditions. We found that MEVF still underestimates the value of ecosystem services, although it can reflect to some extent the annual variation in meteorological factors. Our findings contribute to increasing the accuracy of evaluation of ecosystem services.

Urban ecosystem conditions and ecosystem services – a comparison between large urban zones and city cores in the EU

“…Contemporary practices to enhance urban GI for climate adaptation include green, blue and white roofs, hard and soft permeable surfaces, green alleys and streets, urban forestry and green open spaces such as parks and wetlands (Foster, Lowe, and Winkelman 2011). Taking into consideration the ECIs, policy makers could form an opinion about the condition of the urban green and BIs to obtain a good or desired balance (Davies and Lafortezza 2017), bearing in mind that regions prone to high temperatures or heavy precipitation have a greater need for GI to handle these events (Fang et al 2018). Promoting a low number of artificial areas per inhabitant might be a solution as a high land use intensity, mainly being the result of a high population density and compact settlement structures, is considered to be positive (Prokop, Jobstmann and Sch€ onbauer 2011).…”

Linking Ecosystem Services to Social Well-Being: An Approach to Assess Land Degradation

“…In highland ecosystems, where degradation is negligible, ecosystem had the highest potential to provide most services under the influence of climatic factors such as rainfall. Past studies have also emphasized the importance of rainfall in providing ecosystem services (Fang et al, 2018). Less access of people to use resources may be the main reason for the negligible degradation in highlands.…”

Future Impacts of Climate Change and Land Use on Multiple Ecosystem Services in a Rapidly Urbanizing Agricultural Basin, China

“…Since the spatial resolution of the dataset is too coarse to represent the local climate characteristics in the study area, we applied a simple delta downscaling method [40,83] to increase the resolution of the data. The methods for downscaling the precipitation and temperature data are expressed in Equations (18) and (19), respectively:…”