Land-use zoning management to protecting the Regional Key Ecosystem Services: A case study in the city belt along the Chaobai River, China.

There are complex tradeoffs and synergies between ecosystem services. At the regional scale, some ecosystem services play a more critical role in regional ecological security and social development. Therefore, it is necessary to identify key ecosystem services and prioritize their protection and management to ensure their sustainable and effective delivery in a region. This paper proposes a set of research schemes that comprehensively examine the supply, trade-off, and demand of ecosystem services, using the city belt along the Chaobai River in north China as an example for empirical research. Demarcating a 1 km × 1 km area, we first analyze the spatial-temporal supply patterns of Net Primary Productivity (NPP), Water Yield (WY), Soil Retention (SR), Sand Retention (SAR), and Habitat Quality (HQ) from 2010 to 2015 using the CASA, InVEST, USLE, RWEQ and InVEST models, respectively. Thereafter, we define the Regional Key Ecosystem Service (RKES) through regional reality and Spearman correlation analysis among the five ecosystem services. Finally, based on the disparity between the supply and demand of the RKES, we develop a land zoning approach and propose targeted zoning management measures. The results show that WY was the RKES in the study area. The demand for WY did not exceed supply, and the supply and demand were always in a state of mismatch. The stable area with surplus supply and demand of WY was designated as an Ecological Protected Area, a core area to guarantee the RKES. In general, our scheme can be targeted to address the protection of RKES from the perspective of land management. This is of great significance for ensuring regional ecological security and sustainable use of ecosystem services, and could be used to inform the formulation of ecological protection policies.