Effects of Urbanization on Ecosystem Services in the Shandong Peninsula Urban Agglomeration, in China: The Case of Weifang City

Abstract

Ecosystem services are the material basis of economic and social development, and play essential roles in the sustainable development of ecosystems. Urbanization can remarkably alter the provision of ecosystem services. Most studies in this area have focused on densely populated metropolises with poor ecological environments, while comparatively few studies have focused on cities with low ecological pressures. Therefore, to avoid continuing to engage in the repetitive pattern of destroying first and rehabilitating later, quantitative analyses of urbanization and ecosystem services should be carried out in representative cities. In this study, based on partial least squares-discriminant analysis, kernel density estimation, and correlation analysis, we quantitatively evaluated the impact of urbanization on ecosystem services in Weifang city. The Data Center for Resources and Environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research provided remote sensing data on land use, the gross domestic production (GDP), population data, and ecosystem services. The results were as follows: (1) The variation in population, GDP, and built-up areas consistently increased throughout the study period, whereas the ecosystem service values (ESVs) decreased; (2) food production, raw material production, nutrient cycle maintenance, and soil conservation were decisive ecosystem services that led to vast reductions in ESVs during the process of urbanization; and (3) the negative correlation coefficient between built-up areas and ecosystem services was greater than that between the population or GDP and ecosystem services, which indicated that the impacts of population and economic urbanization on ecosystem services lagged behind the impact of land urbanization. This study provides references for fully recognizing the ecological effects of urbanization, and make suggestions regarding the application of ecosystem services in sustainable development.

Secondary cities under siege: examining peri-urbanisation and farmer households’ livelihood diversification practices in Ghana

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Urbanization Impact on Regional Sustainable Development: Through the Lens of Urban-Rural Resilience

“…The population data of 100 m spatial resolution are derived from the official WorldPop project website ( (accessed on 1 June 2022)), which is modeled based on the MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) GeoCover database and other auxiliary data [ 49 , 50 ]. The land use data of 30 m spatial resolution are obtained for 5-year periods during 2000–2020 from the Resource and Environment Science and Data Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences ( ) (accessed on 1 June 2022) [ 51 , 52 ]. Further, the 30 m resolution land use data are used to calculate the proportion of construction land and cultivated land at 1 km spatial resolution in the BTHUA for each period during 2000–2020 in the study region.…”

Impact of landscape patterns on ecosystem services in China: a case study of the central plains urban agglomeration

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