Both of natural environmental factors and human activities have made dramatic changes to terrestrial ecosystems, and the extent and intensity of the latter has been increasing even breaking the ecological balance and causing some ecological disasters. Land use/cover changes (LUCC) can reflect the influence from the nature and human on eco-environment and many projects and researchers have focused on LUCC as the core of global environmental change and sustainability research for about 24 years, but existing studies pay insufficient attention to regional ecological process changes and focuses on a qualitative approach. On the other hand, decision makers and the conservation of eco-environment are looking forward to getting the support of quantitative analysis and evaluation of ecological effects of LUCC. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the effects of LUCC changes to the eco-environment throughout China from the late 1980s to 2010 by quantitative modeling of eco-environmental quality, named the ecological response index model. The model integrated the proportional relation of global mean economic value of ecosystem service functions proposed by Costanza, those for China revised by Gaodi Xie, and the fuzzy valuation of regional eco-environment quality based on Delphi Expert Consultation method and Analytic Hierarchy Process method to define the fuzzy value of eco-environmental quality for each second level land-use type.
Results/Conclusions
The results indicated a continuous trend of deteriorating regional eco-environment quality in terms of dramatic land use/cover changes in China over past 30 years. Among those changes, the main contributors of deteriorating regional eco-environment quality were land reclamation from woods land, grasslands, water bodies and wetlands (shorted as LR), forest degradation, grassland degradation, and built-up area expansion, with dramatic changes of their individual contribution rates throughout the entire study period. The rate of LR decreased gradually from above 36% of the late 1980s-2000 to only 6% of 2008-2010, while the rate of forest degradation and built-up area expansion increased continuously from about 11% and 3% of the late 1980s to 2000 to almost 38% and 15% of 2008-2010, respectively. Meanwhile, some land use/cover changes were helpful to improve regional eco-environment quality, such as afforestation, ecology restoration of grassland, and returning farmland to woodland (or grassland, water bodies, marsh). Especially, the contribution rate of ecology restoration of woodland increased dramatically from about 9% during the first study period of late 1980s to 2000 to above 21% of 2008-2010.