Quantifying ecosystem service trade‐offs for plantation forest management to benefit provisioning and regulating services

Abstract

There is increasing interest worldwide regarding managing plantation forests in a manner that maintains or improves timber production, enhances ecosystem services, and promotes long‐term sustainability of forest resources. We selected the Gan River Basin, the largest catchment of Poyang Lake and a region with a typical plantation distribution in South China, as the study region. We evaluated and mapped four important forest ecosystem services, including wood volume, carbon storage, water yield, and soil retention at a 30 × 30 m resolution, then quantified their trade‐offs and synergies at the county and subwatershed scales. We found that the wood volume and carbon storage services, as well as the soil retention and water yield, exhibited synergistic relationships. However, the carbon storage displayed a trade‐off relationship with the water yield. Additionally, we compared the beneficial spatial characteristics among dominant species in the study region. The results showed that the Chinese fir forest and the pine forest exhibited lower overall benefits than natural forests including the broad‐leaved forest and the bamboo forest. To propose a suitable management strategy for the study region, method of spatial cluster analysis was used based on the four eco‐services at the subwatershed scale. The basin was divided into four management groups instead of treating the region as a homogenous management region. Finally, we proposed more specific and diverse management strategies to optimize forest benefits throughout the entire region.

Classification and management of community forests in Indian Eastern Himalayas: implications on ecosystem services, conservation and livelihoods

“…In this study, partial differences in perceptions of Adi with regard to the relative importance of a particular ecosystem service (Table 5) are consistent with the observations of Pirard et al (2017) and can be explained by the strong interconnections between food habits, culture and forest resources (Díaz et al 2011). Further, collectively managed and least disturbed forest types, morang, regpi, and mosam (in decreasing order), were found to be rich in such services as previously reported by Dai et al (2017). Communities like Adi inhabiting fragile ecosystems have developed a cohesive bond with such collectively managed forests and the associated ecosystem services than privately owned resources (e.g.…”

“…As our results revealed, 15 criteria used by Adi people in classifying local forests indeed reflect the complexity of knowledge interactions with forest ecosystems, and their potential implications. Adi's forest classification system is affected by many indicators: ecological, institutional, socioeconomic and cultural, as previously reported by Sangha and Jalota (2005) and Dai et al (2017). The degree of inter-relations among such indicators might shape the perception of local people to value or not a particular forest for its tangible and non-tangible services, and accordingly devise the criteria to classify and manage the associated resources.…”

“…Taking insights from Sangha and Jalota (2005) and Dai et al (2017), subsistence, economic, cultural and ecological values of each forest typology were assessed qualitatively through FGD with Adi members asked to assign scores between 1 and 10. Consensus-based scores assigned by participants were based on variations in biophysical attributes and the corresponding indicative factors associated with a particular forest type (see details in Additional file 1: Table S.5 in S1).…”

Ecosystem services bundles: challenges and opportunities for implementation and further research

“…In Denmark, there was a tendency for peri-urban landscapes to be important areas for cultural service sites, which led to the 'multifunctional bundle' types to be situated around the larger cities (Turner et al 2014). Climate aspects were also found to drive the supply bundles (Dai et al 2017), with a study at the European scale even concluding that climate could be the primary driver of ecosystem services supply at the macro-scale (Mouchet et al 2017). Furthermore, simple geomorphologic features of a landscape can act as drivers for some bundle types: for instance, shore areas were found to host tourism-dominated bundles in Germany and Denmark (Turner et al 2014, Dittrich et al 2017-to be attributed notably to the scenic beauty of the sea (Turner et al 2014).…”

Ecosystem Service Benefits and Trade-Offs—Selecting Tree Species in Denmark for Bioenergy Production

“…For the analysis of ecosystem services between species, overall benefits and trade-offs were calculated for each species using the method developed by Bradford and D'Amato [69], and adopted, among others, by Dai, Wang, Zhu and Xi [31]. They define overall benefits as the "degree to which multiple objectives are achieved" and trade-offs as "the disparity in the level of achievement among objectives" [69] p. 2).…”