Ecosystem service restoration, conservation, and supply-demand spatial mismatch mitigation in landscape planning

Research output: Book/ReportPh.D. thesisResearch

Abstract

Ecosystem degradation is not only related to the loss of the intrinsic value of ecosystems, but is also threatening human wellbeing from different aspects such as security and health. Meanwhile, social demands for different natural resources are ever-increasing with socioeconomic development. Managing ecosystems in order to prevent ecosystem degradation and meet human needs has become crucial for decision-makers and scientists. The ecosystem service (ES) provides a systematic conceptual framework for understanding natural contributions to human wellbeing. The ES has been increasingly used to support decision-making in the real world, and landscape planning is an important science-policy interface of the ES research. This thesis explores the approach to incorporating the ES into landscape planning and management, and consists of three individual studies. The first two studies focus on managing the ES supply by spatially identifying ES restoration and conservation areas, while the third study provides a planning insight for ES management from the ES supply-demand perspective. Chapter 1 illustrates the research background of this thesis and reviews the ES knowledge that will be used or enriched in this thesis. After reviewing previous ES studies, I point out the obstacles of integrating the ES approach into landscape planning, which are my concerns in this thesis. This is followed by a brief description of methods, data sources, and study areas for this thesis. Finally, three research objectives are stated. Chapter 2 uses the Grain for Green Project in the Jinan Planning Zone, China, as a case study. The main aim of this chapter is to explore how to identify potential areas of afforestation (PAAs) from a cost-benefit perspective. In this study, ESs and farmland suitability are used to represent the environmental benefits and costs of afforestation projects, and subsequently, a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) method for PAA identification is proposed. To test the feasibility of the CBA method, I compare PAAs identified by the CBA method and the slope degree method widely used in the GFGP practice. The results show that the CBA method can identify the PAAs with higher benefits and lower costs than the slope degree method. Finally, I propose a CBA decision-making framework for PAA identification that can be used in different regions. Taking the Dawen River watershed as a study area, Chapter 3 considers three water-related ESs for conservation. This study explores how to integrate the conservation cost, ecosystem health, and ES social importance as spatial constraints into ES conservation area identification. Specifically, three ES conservation scenarios using different spatial constraints are set as follows: the ES conservation targets (the expected proportion of each ES conserved) are met where there are the low conservation cost (cost-oriented scenario), high ecosystem health (ES sustainable supply scenario), and high ES social importance (social benefit scenario). Additionally, the balanced scenario is presented in which three constraints are considered together. It is found that the method used in this study can identify conservation areas that concurrently meet conservation targets and requirements of spatial constraints under each scenario. The inclusion of different spatial constraints into ES conservation can significantly influence spatial distributions of ES conservation areas. Furthermore, the balanced scenario can avoid trade-offs between requirements of different spatial constraints. As a regional development strategy, regional integration can contribute to the co-occurring benefits of different parts of a region by managing these parts as a whole. Chapter 4 provides an ecological perspective of regional integration, which can act as a novel planning insight for regional ES management. I take the Jinan metropolitan area, consisting of 622 towns, as a case study. In this study, six ESs are first selected to represent the benefits targeted by regional ecological integration. Then, the ES budget, bundle, and flow are used to interpret the potential, basic management unit, and manner of regional ecological integration, respectively. According to the ES budget, five of the ESs have shown the potential to mitigate their supply-demand mismatches by regional ecological integration. Moreover, all the towns are classified into five clusters with distinct ES budget bundles, and the town cluster is suitable as the basic management unit of regional ecological integration. Finally, omni-directional, natural path-dominant, and anthropogenic path-based ES flows are observed between different town clusters, illustrating the manner of regional ecological integration. This study indicates that regional ecological integration is a promising way to mitigate ES supply-demand spatial mismatches for urban agglomerations. Chapter 5 reaches the general conclusions of this thesis. The main conclusions are as follows. First, introducing the CBA into the identification of potential afforestation areas can improve the ES gains and reduce the socioeconomic cost. Second, it is feasible to integrate the conservation cost, ecosystem health, and ES social importance as spatial constraints into ES conservation area identification. Finally, regional ecological integration can act as a novel landscape planning insight for mitigating ES supply-demand spatial mismatches in the urban agglomeration.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherDepartment of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen
Number of pages158
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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