Towards sustainable forestry: Using a spatial Bayesian belief network to quantify trade-offs among forest-related ecosystem services

Synergies and trade-offs of ecosystem services affected by land use structures of small watershed in the Loess Plateau

The Chinese government has implemented a series of ecological restoration projects in the Loess Plateau (LP), and the surface cover changed dramatically, impacting the ecosystem services (ESs) greatly. In this study, we used K-means clustering to classify the land use structures (LUSs) of the LP from 1990 to 2015 at the small watershed scale, and investigated the effects of LUS on water supply (WS), soil conservation (SC), and carbon sequestration (CS, expressed as NPP) with constraint lines. The values of WS and SC were obtained from the InVEST simulation, validated by the hydrographic station data. The results showed that the LUSs in LP were cropland structure (CLS, distinguished with CS), forest structure (FS), grassland structure (GS), crop-grassland structure (CGS), crop-forest-grassland structure (CFGS) and a very few areas of barren structure (BS). The proportion of dominant land use in those LUSs with a balance of WS, SC, and CS was 0.6-0.7 (cropland in CLS), 0.5 (forest in FS), 0.45/0.4 (cropland/grassland in CGS), 0.75 to 0.85 (grassland in GS), and 0.15/0.4/0.25 to 0.35 (cropland/forest/grassland in CFGS), respectively. The types of constraint curves of ESs for those LUSs involves hump-shaped curve, negative convex, half-concave-waved curve and concave-waved curve. This study proposed a method to objectively delineate LUS and improved the constraint line method to make it suitable for cases with less data, innovatively presenting the variation of ESs inside LUSs, which may provide a reference for optimal land planning and sustainable development of social-ecological systems.

Measurement of Forest Ecological Benefits Based on Big Data

Socioeconomic development combined with the development and utilization of forest resources have resulted in the forest ecological environment becoming more and more valuable, and its impact on the national economy has also increased. Firstly, based on a modern statistical model, the dependent variable and independent variable set of standardized forest ecological benefits were determined, and the seemingly unrelated forest ecological benefit model was established. According to the alternative market method and market approximation theory, the first and second monetary models of forest ecological benefit value were constructed using the market approximation coefficient, the effective area coefficient, and the physical quantity conversion coefficient. Next, the concept of “whole diffusion” was introduced into the establishment of the forest ecological benefit model, and the whole diffusion model was established to estimate the physical amount of forest ecological benefits. The concepts of classical forest ecological benefit and generalized forest ecological benefit were proposed. Forest management survey data were used to measure forest ecological benefit, and classic ecological benefit and generalized forest benefit were integrated into one system for the first time. The economic value is 94.31 million RMB ¥.