Elsevier

Ecological Informatics

Volume 64, September 2021, 101368
Ecological Informatics

Evolution of ecosystem service value in rural regions based on geographical scope of entities: A case study of Nanjing, China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101368Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Use the improved CASA model to calculate NPP and vegetation coverage in different periods as correction factors.

  • Evaluate the evolution of rural ESV by combining the urban-rural spatial boundaries at different research stages.

  • Analyzes the driving factors of rural ESV changes from urban expansion and internal land use changes in rural areas.

Abstract

Rural areas have very important ecological service functions. This study investigated the evolution of ecosystem services value (ESV) in rural regions based on the physical geographical scope of rural areas. The replacement value method, shadow price method, precipitation stock method, quantitative measurement by Remote Sensing and Carnegie-Ames-Stanford approach (CASA) model calculations were used to analyze the evolution of ESV (Nutrient cycling, Maintaining atmospheric balance, Organic matter production, Water conservation) in Nanjing's rural regions between 1985 and 2016. The results show that: (1) From 1985 to 2000, all types of rural ESV showed a trend of decline. From 2000 to 2016, all ESV except for water conservation continued to decrease. (2) In the first stage, areas with large losses in rural ESV were mainly concentrated in southerly, southwesterly, and southeasterly directions. In the second stage, only the northerly and northwesterly directions had increased, whereas all other directions had decreased by varying extents. (3) During the stage of township industrialization, ESV were significantly affected by land use changes in rural areas. During the stage of rapid urbanization, urban expansion had a greater impact on rural ESV. Further studies reveal that rural ecosystem service changes are also influenced by deeper factors, with land use change and excessive nutrient loading as direct drivers significantly affecting rural ecosystem service change processes, and economic development and population growth as indirect drivers changing the spatial distribution of ecosystem services by affecting land use patterns and ecosystem quality. In conclusion, we combined geographical spatial analysis with ecological thinking to provide support for the maintenance of rural ESV and sustainable development.

Introduction

Ecosystem services (ES) are the benefits that humans derive directly or indirectly from ecosystems and mainly consist of provisioning, regulating, support and cultural services (Daily, 1997; Laterra et al., 2012). Rural ecosystem, derived from the concept of Ecosystem (Fig. 1), is a natural and semi-artificial ecosystem dominated by nature, which is a complex of natural, economic and social ecological networks formed by human beings, resources and various environmental factors in rural areas (Uuemaa et al., 2009; Zammit et al., 2005). Rural areas play key functional and ecological conservation roles in coordinating the relationship between human and nature, it is characterized by being more healthy, green, and ecological when compared to urban areas (Tu and Long, 2017), and possess more extensive green open spaces and important ES, including air purification, climate regulation, and water conservation et al. Rural ecosystems are also an indispensable component in ensuring high-quality and sustainable regional development (Baró et al., 2017; Larondelle and Haase, 2013). Since the reform and opening-up of China, the rapid development of the socialist market economy has been accompanied by continuous improvement in urban economic development. As a result, metropolitan areas such as Nanjing have gradually expanded and encroached upon a large number of rural areas. These issues, coupled with chaotic land use structure and the emergence of resource and environmental problems in rural areas, have had an immense impact on both the rural ecological environment and sustainable development. In particular, this economic development model leads to excessive demand for supply services and the destruction of regulatory services, resulting in the destruction of rural ecosystems (Lu et al., 2012; Tscharntke et al., 2010). This in turn damages the sustainable development of rural areas and is not conducive to the sustainable development of rural areas. In recent years, China has gradually attached greater importance to the revival of rural areas, proposing the priority development of rural agriculture, economy, and ecology. This requires paying greater attention to rural economic development while also safeguarding the improvement of ecological services. From the perspective of ecology, all kinds of rural natural landscapes have gone far beyond the scope of traditional economy, with rich and important ecological protection functions and diversified ecological services (Fu, 2017; Li et al., 2015). With the rapid development of economy and the improvement of ecological civilization, the importance of ecological service function beyond the traditional economic function has become more prominent.

The rural areas around metropolitan cities are often most strongly and directly radiated and impacted by the towns and cities. The concentration of urban population and industrial development bring about a strong demand for residential and industrial land, while the cities themselves have limited space for development and need to meet their own development needs by constantly expanding to the periphery, occupying a large amount of forest and agricultural land in rural areas, leading to a continuous reduction in the territorial scope of rural entities (Yang et al., 2018a), while the development of rural industries has also exacerbated the disorderly and inefficient land use, which in turn has damaged the ecological service function of rural areas. However, previous studies rarely considered the impact of the geographical scope of rural entities on the ecosystem, mainly taking administrative divisions (Liu et al., 2011; Peng et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2011) or large natural ecosystems (Hao et al., 2012; Hou et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2013) as research units. In addition, most of the previous studies on rural ecological services are based on administrative divisions. With the rapid development of urban-rural integration and township industrialization, the urban-rural spatial boundaries in many metropolitan areas are becoming increasingly blurred, and the division of urban-rural administrative boundaries in metropolitan areas cannot accurately reflect the scope of urban and rural physical areas (Fang and Wang, 2016). So, it would be unscientific and outdated to continue to study the changes of rural regional ESV from the perspective of administrative division. Therefore, at the bases of identifying the geographical scope of rural entities in different stages of Nanjing, the objectives of this research include (1) using multiple fusion method to quantify the spatial distribution of ESV from 1985 to 2016; (2) analysing the characteristics of spatiotemporal evolution of rural ESV at different stages of development; and (3) preliminary identifying the driving factors of ESV at different stages of development.

Section snippets

Study area

Nanjing, located in the eastern part of China, is an important gateway city in the Yangtze River Delta region, which plays a vital role in promoting the economic development of surrounding cities. There are 11 districts under its jurisdiction, covering a total area of 6597 km2. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the urbanization process of Nanjing has been accelerated, land use and urban area have changed dramatically, the population density and the economic growth speed have accelerated.

Data and methodology

Costanza (2000) took the lead in measuring ecological assets in the world, which provided an important reference for the establishment of remote sensing evaluation model of ecological service value (Fan and Li, 2019; Rositano et al., 2017). On the basis of determining the geographical scope of rural entities in different stages of Nanjing, and referring to the research results of Liu et al. (2013), the replacement value method, shadow price method, precipitation stock method et al. were used to

Land use change

Since 1985, with the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization, the urbanization process of Nanjing has developed rapidly, the land use types have changed greatly, and the construction land has expanded on a large scale. The area of cropland, woodland and grassland showed a downward trend from 1985 to 2016, while the area of construction land, water area and unused land showed an increasing trend, of which the area of cropland decreased the most, and the area of construction land

The stage and complexity of the driving factors

Because of the difference of ecological environment quality in different economic development stages, it is necessary to use the improved CASA model to calculate the net primary productivity and vegetation coverage of vegetation in different periods as correction factors. The value of rural ESV was calculated and analyzed by combining the remote sensing assessment method of ecological assets, market value method and alternative value method, so that the results were more consistent with the

Conclusions

At the basis of identify the geographical scope of rural entities, the replacement value method, shadow price method, precipitation stock method and the CASA model were used to measure and analyze the spatiotemporal changes in rural ESV over time in Nanjing. This study abandons the traditional method of administrative division as the main research unit, which has a certain reference significance.

  • (1)

    From 1985 to 2016, the total rural ESV in Nanjing showed a trend of decline. During the two research

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Major Science and Technology Projects for Social Development in Jiangsu Province (BE2019773), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA23020102).

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