| Biodiversity is the diversity of living organisms and the ecological complex where they survive on,and is the core elements of natural ecosystems.Ecosystem services refer to the natural environmental conditions and various benefits formed by the ecosystems.Ecosystems maintain the entire ecosystem services for safeguarding the human well-being.With increasing pressures on ecosystems caused by the rapid population growth and accelerating process of urbanization,biodiversity is undergoing a sharp loss,and is consequently resulting in the degradation of ecosystem services.To deal with the vicious circle of biodiversity loss and poor ecosystem services,people from all sectors of the world are actively seeking effective solutions.Most of the existing protected areas are established based on the goal of mitigating biodiversity loss.The current conservation efficiency is relatively very low and cannot meet the needs for conserving ecosystem services.Therefore,a more comprehensive planning approach for integrating biodiversity and ecosystem services is needed.This will help to improve the conservation efficiency by allocating limited resources into the areas in urgent need of protection.With the Three Parallel Rivers Region as the study area,this research used both biodiversity features and ecosystem services as conservation targets.The biodiversity targets consisted of endangered,rare and endemic animal and plant species and vegetation types,and the ecosystem service targets included five types of ecosystem services belonging to three broad categories of regulation,supply and cultural services.These five types of ecosystem services,including carbon sequestration,soil retention,carbon stock,nature recreation and water supply,are of great importance to the local area.Conservation targets were set according to previous studies,the IUCN endangered species categories,species range size and endemism.With the Human Disturbance Index as a surrogate for the economic cost,this study first identified the separate priority conservation areas(PCAs)for biodiversity and each of the five ecosystem services by implementing the Systematic Conservation Planning(SCP)software Marxan,respectively.Spearman's correlation coefficient was used to explore the associations between the different portfolios of PCAs for biodiversity and ecosystem services.Those ecosystem services highly correlated with biodiversity were considered being compatible ones and integrated with biodiversity in SCP.This study then generated a serious of PCA scenarios including the biodiversity only PCAs,PCAs integrating biodiversity and ecosystem services,and ecosystem service only PCAs.The driving effects of ecosystem services for the biodiversity only PCAs were finally investigated by comparing these PCA scenarios in terms of their total areas,costs,conservation efficiencies,and distributions on different land-use types,elevation zones and within existing protected areas.As follows:(1)The separate PCAs for biodiversity and five types of ecosystem services all had wide distributions in Shangri-La and also concentrated on both sides of Nu Jiang.The biodiversity PCAs had big areas in the west,whereas with small coverage in the middle regions.The PCAs of carbon sequestration service had a wide distribution,but the PCAs for the other four services had small coverages in the southeast regions.(2)In terms of the associations among the six portfolios of PCAs separately identified for biodiversity and each type of ecosystem services,the distribution of biodiversity PCAs was significantly positively correlated with those for the five types of ecosystem services.The PCAs for nature recreation service had the highest correlation with that for the carbon stock service,followed by the correlation between PCAs for nature recreation and water supply services.The correlations between biodiversity PCAs and those for natural recreation service,water supply service,carbon sequestration service and soil retention service were moderate or stronger.The remaining correlations between the different portfolios of PCAs were relatively weak.(3)The areas and costs of the PCAs kept increasing with the types(from one to five)of ecosystem services integrated with biodiversity in SCP.All these PCA scenarios like the ecosystem service only PCAs had concentrated distributions on both sides of Gaoligong Mountain,Dulong River and Nu Jiang.(4)The conservation efficiencies of all PCA scenarios generated in this study for species targets were higher than that of the existing protected areas.The defined goals for the three levels of conservation vegetation types can be achieved by the PCAs in this study and existing protected areas.The PCAs can not meet the goals for those ecosystem services that were not included as conservation targets.In general,the conservation efficiencies of all PCA scenarios in this study were higher than that of existing PAs,and existing PAs can not achieve the defined goals for all types of ecosystem services.(5)With more types of ecosystem services being included in SCP,the area proportions of PCAs for biodiversity only,integrated scenarios and ecosystem services only within different land-use types have certain change rules,and such rules have certain similarities and differences.The area proportions of PCAs showed a decreasing and increasing trend in the lower and high elevation zones,respectively,when more types of ecosystem services were integrated.The overlap extents between biodiversity only and the other PCA scenarios showed a sudden decrease when the first ecosystem service was added as the conservation target.The overlap first increased slightly and then began to decrease slowly when more ecosystem services were included.The overlaps between ecosystem services only and the other PCAs increased gradually to the extent when biodiversity was not included as conservation targets,and then increased greatly.The overlaps between PCAs and existing PAs were first increased slowly and then gradually decreased,without a significant trend of increase or decrease. |
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