6. Land-Use-Oriented Conservation of Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services suffer from both the human intervention, such as land-use zoning change, and the natural intervention, such as climate change. In this chapter, we first conducted land-use zoning for conserving ecosystem services in the middle reaches of the Heihe River Basin (HRB). Under the background of climate change, regulation services of ecosystem could be strengthened under proper land-use zoning policy to mitigate climate change. We conducted a case study in the middle reaches of the HRB to assess the ecosystem service conservation zoning under the change of land use associated with climate variations. The results show the spatial impact of land-use zoning on ecosystem services in the study area which are significant reference for the spatial optimization of land-use zoning in preserving the key ecosystem services to mitigate climate change. The research contributes to the growing literature in finely characterizing the ecosystem service zones altered by land-use change to alleviate the impact of climate change, as there is no such systematic ecosystem zoning method before. Further, we introduced ecosystem-based adaptation measures for climate change in Qinghai Province. The change of land surface can exert significant influence on the future climate change. We analyzed the effects of herdsmen’s adaptation to climate change on the livestock breeding, income, and land surface dynamics with a land surface parameterization scheme. The empirical analysis was first carried out on the impacts of the adaptation measures of herdsmen on their income in the context of the climate change with the positive mathematical programming (PMP) model on the basis of the household survey data in the Three-River Source Region, an ecologically fragile area in Qinghai Province, China. Then, the land surface parameterization process is analyzed based on the agent-based model (ABM), which involves the herdsmen’s adaptation measures on climate change, and it also provides reference for the land surface change projection. The result shows that the climate change adaptation measures will have a positive effect on increasing the amount of herdsman’s livestock and income as well as future land surface dynamics. Some suggestions on the land-use management were finally proposed, which can provide significant reference information for the land-use planning. Finally, we introduced how to build resilience to climate change for conserving ecosystem servers. The ecosystem resilience plays a key role in maintaining a steady flow of ecosystem services and enables quick and flexible responses to climate change, and maintaining or restoring the ecosystem resilience of forests is a necessary societal adaptation to climate change; however, there is a great lack of spatially explicit ecosystem resilience assessments. Drawing on principles of the ecosystem resilience highlighted in the literature, we built on the theory of dissipative structures to develop a conceptual model of the ecosystem resilience of forests. A hierarchical indicator system was designed with the influencing factors of the forest ecosystem resilience, including the stand conditions and the ecological memory, which were further disaggregated into specific indicators. Furthermore, indicator weights were determined with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the coefficient of variation method. Based on the remote sensing data, forest inventory data, so forth, the resilience index of forests was calculated. The result suggests that there is a significant spatial heterogeneity of the ecosystem resilience of forests, indicating it is feasible to generate large-scale ecosystem resilience maps with this assessment model, and the results can provide a scientific basis for the conservation of forests, which is of great significance to the climate change mitigation.