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Balancing ecological conservation and economic development is a significant global challenge, particularly in developing countries where rich natural resources often coincide with impoverished areas. This study used the Yunhe Terrace as a case, integrating remote sensing data and statistical analysis to quantify the ecosystem asset value and its changes before and after ecological conservation efforts. Additionally, we assessed the nonmaterial service value and conducted a questionnaire survey to explore the impact of nonmaterial service value on the socio-economic development of local residents. The key findings are as follows: (1) The ecosystem assets of the Yunhe Terrace include four main types: forests, grasslands, wetlands, and cultivated land. In 2020, the Yunhe Terrace ecosystem was primarily composed of forest (56.79%) and cultivated land (36.61%), showing a balance between natural and modified landscapes. (2) The monetary value of ecosystem assets was calculated based on the economic net benefits of ecosystem assets over their expected useful lifespan (20 years in this study). The value of the Yunhe Terrace ecosystem before and after it became a scenic spot was assessed. Results showed that the total value of ecosystem assets increased from 265 million CNY to 523 million CNY over a 20-year period, representing an increase of 257 million CNY. (3) The value of nonmaterial services, represented here by net revenues from eco-tourism, was calculated from 2018 to 2022, covering the period before and after ecological conservation efforts began in 2019. Results showed the value of nonmaterial services rose from 3.07 million CNY in 2018 to 8.90 million CNY in 2022, a growth of 189.77% after ecological conservation. (4) Field surveys and questionnaire analysis of stakeholders’ income sources suggest that ecological conservation and recreational development in the Yunhe Terrace ecosystem have increased household income in terms of both the number of income sources and monetary value. This study demonstrates that ecological conservation and tourism can enhance household welfare, contributing to a better understanding of the dynamics between conservation and economic development. Full article

Terraces are the major land-use type of agriculture and support the main agricultural production in southeast and southwest China. However, due to smallholder farming, complex terrains, natural disasters and illegal land occupations, a light-weight and low cost dynamic monitoring of agricultural terraces has become a serious concern for smallholder production systems in the above area. In this work, we propose a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based multi-temporal image registration method that plays an important role in transforming multi-temporal images into one coordinate system and determines the effectiveness of the subsequent change detection for dynamic agricultural terrace monitoring. The proposed method consists of four steps: (i) guided image filtering based agricultural terrace image preprocessing, (ii) texture and geometric structure features extraction and combination, (iii) multi-feature guided point set registration, and (iv) feature points based image registration. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method by 20 pairs of aerial images captured from Longji and Yunhe terraces, China using a small UAV (the DJI Phantom 4 Pro), and also compared against four state-of-the-art methods where our method shows the best alignments in most cases. Full article