“…In recent years, trade-off analysis has emerged as a new research field, and previous studies have explored trade-offs among the four types of ESs (provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services) (Raudsepp-Hearne et al, 2010;White et al, 2012;Ballantine et al, 2015) and among the subtypes within a given type (e.g., the provisioning of fresh water and food) (Lautenbach et al, 2013;Frank et al, 2014). Trade-off analysis is a key issue when integrating ESs for landscape planning, management, and decision making (Mach et al, 2015;Darvill and Lindo, 2016;Gissi et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2017;Vogdrup-Schmidt et al, 2017), and it has been used to coordinate ESs in various fields, such as agriculture (Lautenbach et al, 2013), tourism (White et al, 2012), energy (Gissi et al, 2016), and ecological restoration (Wang et al, 2017), which encompasses various geographical features around the world, including wetlands (Mach et al, 2015), mountains (Wang et al, 2017), plateaus (Zheng et al, 2016), seaboards (White et al, 2012), and islands (Goldstein et al, 2012). Therefore, trade-off analysis potentially represents a new way to guide ecological restoration on the Loess Plateau of China, where the ecological system is fragile, and water resources are scarce.…”