Uncovering the relationships between ecosystem services and social-ecological drivers at different spatial scales in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region

Abstract

Ecosystem service is widely acknowledged as a mainstream and valuable concept for the sustainability-oriented decision-makings on meeting the fundamental needs for improving human well-being and addressing the critical challenges such as food scarcity, land degradation, climate warming, biodiversity loss, flood risk and population pressure. Different ecosystem services arise through combinations of social-ecological drivers and interact with each other across scales. Essential to design effective policy interventions toward achieving sustainability is clarifying the relationships among ecosystem services and the underlying drivers at different scales. Therefore, this study analysed the spatial patterns and relationships of six ecosystem service supplies and examined their responses to ten social-ecological drivers at three spatial scales in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in 2015. Our results revealed differences in ecosystem service spatial pattern robustness across scales. The trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services changed less in direction and more in strength at the three scales. The relationships between the provisioning service and the other ecosystem services were mostly antagonistic, and those between the regulating services and cultural service were predominately synergistic. Different types of ecosystem service bundles comprising different abundances of services were detected, and reconfiguration of ecosystem service bundles occurred as the scale changed. The directions of social-ecological drivers’ impacts varied across ecosystem services, and the magnitudes of social-ecological drivers’ impacts on the services varied at different scales. Across the three spatial scales, the most influential driver of ecosystem services was the normalized difference vegetation index, to which different ecosystem services responded diversely and non-linearly. Our results advocated the multiscale assessment of ecosystem services and social-ecological drivers and emphasized the necessity of embracing scale dependency in the hierarchical governance of ecosystem services.