Assessment of Watershed Ecosystem Services under Climate Change and Urbanization

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Water Resources Management, Policy and Governance".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2023) | Viewed by 1353

Special Issue Editors

Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Interests: ecosystem services; water management; land-use change; agriculture management; climate change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
College of Public Administration, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
Interests: water management; water use efficiency; water productivity; land management

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Watershed ecosystems are a combination of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and are complex ecosystems integrating social, economic and natural subsystems. Watershed ecosystem services are influenced by both natural and human drivers. Climate change, as the main driver, affects the hydrological cycle and the quality of the water environment in the basin through changes in temperature and precipitation, and influences the level of service provision and regulation. In the process of urbanization, dense populations and high development intensity have brought a great deal of water environment and ecological problems, such as the reduction of water area, the decline in water quality and watershed regulation capacity, and an increase in waterlogging risk, making watershed ecosystem services restoration an environmental issue of worldwide concern. Urbanization and climate change will inevitably affect watershed runoff and ecological services. The ultimate aim of measuring and predicting ecosystem services is to maintain natural health and ensure the sustainability of ecosystem services on which people rely. Therefore, reasonable assessments of watershed ecosystem services can supply operational means for decision-makers to preserve and manage watershed environments.

Our knowledge on how climate change and urbanization affect watershed ecosystem services change is still limited; research from perspectives of spatial ecosystem services supply and demand assessment, interactions between human and natural systems, multi-scale driving mechanism analysis etc. in key urban areas should be further enhanced. We welcome the submission of high-quality conceptual and empirical papers for ideas and inspirations related to our topics, as follows:

  • Assessment of watershed ecosystem services;
  • Impacts of climate change and urbanization on ecosystem services;
  • Industrial structure adjustment and optimization for coordinated development;
  • Regulation policy for watershed ecosystem restoration;
  • Carrying capacity of water environment;
  • Climate change, urbanization and water quality.

This Special Issue will provide more advanced methods, perspectives and case studies for the clarification of the impact of climate change and urbanization on watershed ecosystem services, which is useful for better serving regional sustainable urban development and optimal watershed ecosystem service management.

Dr. Zhihui Li
Dr. Qing Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • watershed ecosystem services
  • water management
  • climate change
  • urbanization
  • sustainable development

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 8748 KiB  
Article
Landscape Ecological Risk Assessment and Driving Force Analysis of the Heihe River Basin in the Zhangye Area of China
by Jitao Lan, Zonggang Chai, Xianglong Tang and Xi Wang
Water 2023, 15(20), 3588; https://doi.org/10.3390/w15203588 - 13 Oct 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 854
Abstract
Watershed ecosystems are crucial to the overall sustainable development of a region, and a scientific and effective grasp of the characteristics of land-use change in a watershed, and the factors affecting land change, is an important prerequisite for the high-quality construction of watershed [...] Read more.
Watershed ecosystems are crucial to the overall sustainable development of a region, and a scientific and effective grasp of the characteristics of land-use change in a watershed, and the factors affecting land change, is an important prerequisite for the high-quality construction of watershed ecology, which needs to be emphasized. As the second largest inland river in the arid zone of Western China, the Heihe River Basin (HRB) has been affected by human and natural factors in recent years, and the ecological environment is relatively fragile, and there is an urgent need to analyze the ecological characteristics of the basin and to explore the relevant influencing factors in order to provide a basis for subsequent ecological management. Therefore, this article applies the landscape index, the landscape ecological risk index (ERI) model and the geodetector tools to analyze the land-use data from 2000 to 2020 in the Zhangye area of the HRB to study the characteristics of the ecological risk evolution and the driving forces affecting the ecological risk differentiation. The results show the following: (1) the area of the regional land-use change accounts for 4.99% of the total area, and the landscape pattern as a whole shows an increasing degree of fragmentation and a decreasing trend of aggregation; (2) the distribution of the ERI in the region shows a trend of being low in the center and high in the periphery, with an increase of 2.11% in the area of the lowest and lower risk and a decrease of 1.77% in the highest and higher, and the temporal change shows an increase followed by a significant decrease; (3) the human interference degree is the dominant factor influencing the spatial differentiation of the ERI in the basin area. There are significant differences between social factors, climate factors and land factors. Full article
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