Integrating decision-making preferences into ecosystem service conservation area identification: A case study of water-related ecosystem services in the Dawen River watershed, China
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The degradation of ecosystems and their services is threatening human wellbeing, making ecosystem service (ES) conservation an urgent necessity. In ES conservation planning, conservation area identification is crucial for the success of conservation initiatives. However, different decision-making preferences have not been fully considered and integrated in ES conservation area identification. This study takes the Dawen River watershed as the study area and considers three water-related ESs to be conserved. We aim to integrate the decision-making preferences of cost-effectiveness, ES sustainable supply, and ES social benefit into identifying ES conservation areas by using conservation cost, ecosystem health, and ES social importance as spatial constraints, respectively. We identified ES conservation area alternatives under the scenarios set according to different decision-making preferences. Specifically, ES conservation targets, i.e., the expected proportion of each ES in conservation areas, are designed to be met where there is low conservation cost (cost-oriented scenario), high ecosystem health (ES sustainable supply scenario), or high ES social importance (ES social benefit scenario). A balanced scenario considering all three decision-making preferences together is further established. The results show that under each scenario, the identified conservation areas can concurrently meet the conservation targets and decision-making preferences. The consideration of different decision-making preferences can greatly influence the spatial distributions of ES conservation areas. Moreover, a severe trade-off between conservation cost and ES social importance is observed under the ES social benefit scenario, and the balanced scenario can achieve a synergy of decision-making preferences. Our study provides a method to integrate the decision-making preference into ES conservation area identification, which can improve the rationality and practicality of ES conservation planning.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Artikelnummer | 117972 |
| Tidsskrift | Journal of Environmental Management |
| Vol/bind | 340 |
| Antal sider | 16 |
| ISSN | 0301-4797 |
| DOI | |
| Status | Udgivet - 2023 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
ES hotspot mapping is a commonly-used method for identifying ES priority conservation areas (Schroter and Remme, 2016). For example, Bai et al. (2021) have integrated the hotspot of multiple ESs into Ecological Red Line identification in Mainland Southeast Asia; Hou et al. (2018) have developed an ecological conservation decision-making framework supported by ES hotspot mapping. Despite the development of ES hotspot technologies, The main principle of ES hotspot mapping methods has remained constant—ES hotspots are areas with high ES intensity (Schroter and Remme, 2016). However, the ES hotspot method fails to consider the preference of decision-makers, which may not fit ES conservation initiatives in the real world. The decision-making preference about the conservation cost has been commonly mentioned, especially when conservation budgets are limited (de Groot et al., 2022). Some decision-makers suggest that ES conservation areas do not necessarily need the highest ES intensity, but rather should achieve specific ES conservation targets at a low conservation cost (Schroter and Remme, 2016). Several spatial decision support tools of systematic conservation planning such as Marxan have been developed to support the integration of socioeconomic cost into ES conservation (Adame et al., 2015). Conservation costs can vary in space (Naidoo et al., 2006), and Marxan is designed to iteratively select lands of low costs until ES conservation targets are met by the aggregate of ESs associated with the lands selected (Watson et al., 2019). Therefore, the conservation cost is essentially a spatial constraint for ES conservation, which requires conservation to be prioritized on lands where conservation costs are low (Egoh et al., 2011).We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their great contributions to the improvement of this manuscript. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFB2102902), the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (SKLURE2021-2-2), National Natural Science Foundation of China (42101253).
Funding Information:
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their great contributions to the improvement of this manuscript. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China ( 2019YFB2102902 ), the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( SKLURE2021-2-2 ), National Natural Science Foundation of China ( 42101253 ).
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