Impacts of changes in climate and landscape pattern on ecosystem services

The restoration of degraded vegetation can effectively improve ecosystem services, increase human well-being, and promote regional sustainable development. Understanding the changing trends in ecosystem services and their drivers is an important step in informing decision makers for the development of reasonable landscape management measures. From 2001 to 2014, we analyzed the changing trends in five critical ecosystem services in the Xilingol Grassland, which is typical of grasslands in North China, including net primary productivity (NPP), soil conservation (SC), soil loss due to wind (SL), water yield (WY) and water retention (WR). Additionally, we quantified how climatic factors and landscape patterns affect the five ecosystem services on both annual and seasonal time scales. Overall, the results indicated that vegetation restoration can effectively improve the five grassland ecosystem services, and precipitation (PPT) is the most critical climatic factor. The impact of changes in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was most readily detectable on the annual time scale, whereas the impact of changes in landscape pattern was most readily detectable on the seasonal time scale. A win-win situation in terms of grassland ecosystem services (e.g., vegetation productivity, SC, WR and reduced SL) can be achieved by increasing grassland aggregation, partitioning the largest grasslands, dividing larger areas of farmland into smaller patches, and increasing the area of appropriate forest stands. Our work may aid policymakers in developing regional landscape management schemes.