Abstract:

Ningxia is an important region in Northwest China. Thus, it is imperative to study land use change and its impact on ecosystem services to improve the ecological environment of Ningxia and put forward environmental protection measures for the future. However, previous studies have primarily focused on the changes in the ecosystem services during historical periods but lacked a prediction of the ecosystem services and their trade-offs and synergistic relationships under future scenarios. Therefore, this study simulated the land use status under three future scenarios, quantified the four ecosystem services of carbon storage, soil conservation, water yield, and grain yield under the different land use types, and ascertained their trade-offs and synergies at various spatial scales. The main conclusions are as follows: in the future, the water yield of the three scenarios was lower than that of the current year, and the soil conservation and carbon storage were the largest in the ecological protection scenario, reaching 7.98×10⁷ and 4.72×10⁷ tons, respectively. In contrast, the grain yield was the largest in the farmland protection scenario, reaching 1.52×10⁷ tons. The trade-off relationship between ecosystem services mainly occurred between the regulating and supplying services and the synergy relationship between the regulating services. At the provincial scale, only carbon storage and soil conservation services demonstrated a high synergistic relationship; at the regional and county scales, the synergy between water yield and carbon storage services was also remarkable.

Key words: landuse, ecosystem services, trade-offs and synergy, spatial scales, Ningxia