As a highly valuable region that provides multiple important ecosystem services, the Qinghai-Tibe... more As a highly valuable region that provides multiple important ecosystem services, the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is vulnerable to climate change and human activities, which have induced significant land cover changes from 1990 to 2015. However, the impact of these changes on the ecosystem service values in the 25 years remains unknown. In this study, we used the combined approach of land cover proxy and unit value transfer method to assess changes in ecosystem service values. The results showed that total ecosystem service values including provisioning, regulating, habitat and cultural services has increased from ca. 1.77 trillion in 1990 to ca. 1.81 trillion US dollars in 2015, mainly due to the considerable expansion of rivers and lakes and a decrease of bare lands and glacier and snow. Although the elasticity analysis found that the response of ESV changes is not that elastic to LULC changes in three periods, 1990-2000, 2000-2010 and 2010-2015, it can still be used as a detector to locate unusual changes in different regions and to indicate urgent need for specific ecosystem management.
The Loess Plateau is not only a critical region that suffers from ecological threats but also a v... more The Loess Plateau is not only a critical region that suffers from ecological threats but also a valuable region that provides various fundamental ecosystem services, including provisioning, regulating and cultural services to about 8% of the Chinese population. The specific natural environment and extensive human activities have led to substantial land use/land cover changes between 1990 and 2015, such as the decrease in cropland with the increase in forests and grasslands due to the implementation of the Grain for Green Program since 2000 and the expansion of built-up areas with economic development and population growth. However, the effects of these changes on ecosystem service values have not yet been considered. In this study, the approach based on a combination of land use/land cover proxies and benefit transfer is applied to assess ecosystem service value changes resulting from land use/land cover changes in the 1990–2000, 2000–2010 and 2010–2015 periods. The results reveal t...
Environmental degradation has become one of the major obstacles to sustainable development and hu... more Environmental degradation has become one of the major obstacles to sustainable development and human well-being internationally. Scientific efforts are being made to understand the mechanism of environmental degradation and sustainability. Critical Zone (CZ) science and research on the multi-functional landscape are emerging fields in Earth science that can contribute to such scientific efforts. This paper reviews the progress, similarities and current status of these two scientific research fields, and identifies a number of opportunities for their synergistic integration through functional and multi-functional approaches, process-based monitoring, mechanistic analyses and dynamic modeling, global long-term and networked monitoring and systematic modeling supported by scaling and deep coupling. These approaches proposed in this paper have the potential to support sustainable human well-being by strengthening a functional orientation that consolidates multi-functional landscape rese...
Contexts An important feature of ecosystem service interaction is that it changes over time and a... more Contexts An important feature of ecosystem service interaction is that it changes over time and across spatial scales. Objectives This research aims to find which ecosystem service interactions temporally vary and depend on spatial scale. Methods We calculated six ecosystem services of the Baota District on the central Loess Plateau of China for 2000, 2005, and 2010. Furthermore, we quantified the interactions among these services at the beginning and after the end of the first phase of the Grain for Green Program in this area, and across the pixel scale of 1 km 2 and the town scale. Results Water yield decreased significantly, and habitat quality, net primary productivity, and evapotranspiration increased significantly across different land use types from 2000 to 2005. The synergy between food productivity and water yield, and the trade-off between water yield and evapotranspiration, greatly reduced from 2000 to 2010 at the pixel scale. Water yield was a trade-off to habitat quality, NPP, and recreation capacity in 2000 at the pixel scale while a synergy to the three services in 2010. The synergies between habitat quality and NPP, evapotranspiration, and recreation capacity at the pixel scale were enhanced from 2000 to 2010. Changes in the direction or significance of correlations among ecosystem services were observed across the pixel and town scales in 2000 and 2010. Conclusions This study contributes to increasing the understanding of the temporal variation of ecosystem service interactions caused by regional ecological restoration programs, and the spatial scale dependency of the interactions.
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, Jan 20, 2017
Traditional means of assessing representativeness of conservation value in protected areas depend... more Traditional means of assessing representativeness of conservation value in protected areas depend on measures of structural biodiversity. The effectiveness of priority conservation areas at representing critical natural capital (CNC) (i.e., an essential and renewable subset of natural capital) remains largely unknown. We analyzed the representativeness of CNC-conservation priority areas in national nature reserves (i.e., nature reserves under jurisdiction of the central government with large spatial distribution across the provinces) in China with a new biophysical-based composite indicator approach. With this approach, we integrated the net primary production of vegetation, topography, soil, and climate variables to map and rank terrestrial ecosystems capacities to generate CNC. National nature reserves accounted for 6.7% of CNC-conservation priority areas across China. Considerable gaps (35.2%) existed between overall (or potential) CNC representativeness nationally and CNC repres...
As one of the key tools for regulating human-ecosystem relations, environmental conservation poli... more As one of the key tools for regulating human-ecosystem relations, environmental conservation policies can promote ecological rehabilitation across a variety of spatiotemporal scales. However, quantifying the ecological effects of such policies at the regional level is difficult. A case study was conducted at the regional level in the ecologically vulnerable region of the Loess Plateau, China, through the use of several methods including the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), hydrological modeling and multivariate analysis. An assessment of the changes over the period of 2000-2008 in four key ecosystem services was undertaken to determine the effects of the Chinese government's ecological rehabilitation initiatives implemented in 1999. These ecosystem services included water regulation, soil conservation, carbon sequestration and grain production. Significant conversions of farmland to woodland and grassland were found to have resulted in enhanced soil conservation and carbon ...
As a highly valuable region that provides multiple important ecosystem services, the Qinghai-Tibe... more As a highly valuable region that provides multiple important ecosystem services, the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is vulnerable to climate change and human activities, which have induced significant land cover changes from 1990 to 2015. However, the impact of these changes on the ecosystem service values in the 25 years remains unknown. In this study, we used the combined approach of land cover proxy and unit value transfer method to assess changes in ecosystem service values. The results showed that total ecosystem service values including provisioning, regulating, habitat and cultural services has increased from ca. 1.77 trillion in 1990 to ca. 1.81 trillion US dollars in 2015, mainly due to the considerable expansion of rivers and lakes and a decrease of bare lands and glacier and snow. Although the elasticity analysis found that the response of ESV changes is not that elastic to LULC changes in three periods, 1990-2000, 2000-2010 and 2010-2015, it can still be used as a detector to locate unusual changes in different regions and to indicate urgent need for specific ecosystem management.
The Loess Plateau is not only a critical region that suffers from ecological threats but also a v... more The Loess Plateau is not only a critical region that suffers from ecological threats but also a valuable region that provides various fundamental ecosystem services, including provisioning, regulating and cultural services to about 8% of the Chinese population. The specific natural environment and extensive human activities have led to substantial land use/land cover changes between 1990 and 2015, such as the decrease in cropland with the increase in forests and grasslands due to the implementation of the Grain for Green Program since 2000 and the expansion of built-up areas with economic development and population growth. However, the effects of these changes on ecosystem service values have not yet been considered. In this study, the approach based on a combination of land use/land cover proxies and benefit transfer is applied to assess ecosystem service value changes resulting from land use/land cover changes in the 1990–2000, 2000–2010 and 2010–2015 periods. The results reveal t...
Environmental degradation has become one of the major obstacles to sustainable development and hu... more Environmental degradation has become one of the major obstacles to sustainable development and human well-being internationally. Scientific efforts are being made to understand the mechanism of environmental degradation and sustainability. Critical Zone (CZ) science and research on the multi-functional landscape are emerging fields in Earth science that can contribute to such scientific efforts. This paper reviews the progress, similarities and current status of these two scientific research fields, and identifies a number of opportunities for their synergistic integration through functional and multi-functional approaches, process-based monitoring, mechanistic analyses and dynamic modeling, global long-term and networked monitoring and systematic modeling supported by scaling and deep coupling. These approaches proposed in this paper have the potential to support sustainable human well-being by strengthening a functional orientation that consolidates multi-functional landscape rese...
Contexts An important feature of ecosystem service interaction is that it changes over time and a... more Contexts An important feature of ecosystem service interaction is that it changes over time and across spatial scales. Objectives This research aims to find which ecosystem service interactions temporally vary and depend on spatial scale. Methods We calculated six ecosystem services of the Baota District on the central Loess Plateau of China for 2000, 2005, and 2010. Furthermore, we quantified the interactions among these services at the beginning and after the end of the first phase of the Grain for Green Program in this area, and across the pixel scale of 1 km 2 and the town scale. Results Water yield decreased significantly, and habitat quality, net primary productivity, and evapotranspiration increased significantly across different land use types from 2000 to 2005. The synergy between food productivity and water yield, and the trade-off between water yield and evapotranspiration, greatly reduced from 2000 to 2010 at the pixel scale. Water yield was a trade-off to habitat quality, NPP, and recreation capacity in 2000 at the pixel scale while a synergy to the three services in 2010. The synergies between habitat quality and NPP, evapotranspiration, and recreation capacity at the pixel scale were enhanced from 2000 to 2010. Changes in the direction or significance of correlations among ecosystem services were observed across the pixel and town scales in 2000 and 2010. Conclusions This study contributes to increasing the understanding of the temporal variation of ecosystem service interactions caused by regional ecological restoration programs, and the spatial scale dependency of the interactions.
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, Jan 20, 2017
Traditional means of assessing representativeness of conservation value in protected areas depend... more Traditional means of assessing representativeness of conservation value in protected areas depend on measures of structural biodiversity. The effectiveness of priority conservation areas at representing critical natural capital (CNC) (i.e., an essential and renewable subset of natural capital) remains largely unknown. We analyzed the representativeness of CNC-conservation priority areas in national nature reserves (i.e., nature reserves under jurisdiction of the central government with large spatial distribution across the provinces) in China with a new biophysical-based composite indicator approach. With this approach, we integrated the net primary production of vegetation, topography, soil, and climate variables to map and rank terrestrial ecosystems capacities to generate CNC. National nature reserves accounted for 6.7% of CNC-conservation priority areas across China. Considerable gaps (35.2%) existed between overall (or potential) CNC representativeness nationally and CNC repres...
As one of the key tools for regulating human-ecosystem relations, environmental conservation poli... more As one of the key tools for regulating human-ecosystem relations, environmental conservation policies can promote ecological rehabilitation across a variety of spatiotemporal scales. However, quantifying the ecological effects of such policies at the regional level is difficult. A case study was conducted at the regional level in the ecologically vulnerable region of the Loess Plateau, China, through the use of several methods including the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE), hydrological modeling and multivariate analysis. An assessment of the changes over the period of 2000-2008 in four key ecosystem services was undertaken to determine the effects of the Chinese government's ecological rehabilitation initiatives implemented in 1999. These ecosystem services included water regulation, soil conservation, carbon sequestration and grain production. Significant conversions of farmland to woodland and grassland were found to have resulted in enhanced soil conservation and carbon ...
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