Author(s): Ruonan Li; Rui Han; Duan Chen.; Hua Zheng; Binbin Huang
Linked Author(s): Ruonan Li, Rui Han
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: Several decades have passed since the large scale ecological restoration projects were implemented in China, the benefit tradeoff in spatial and temporal scale caused by the projects have received widespread attention but lack of research. In this paper, we quantify the regulating and provision service to assess the ecological restoration effects over 30 years in semi-arid watershed. It is found that from 1980 to 2010 soil erosion dropped 40% because of afforestation, indicating that the sandstorm prevention was enhanced by these projects. Meanwhile, within afforestation area the abrupt decline point of surface runoff appeared in the sub-basins around 1998, but no significant decline in non-project area. This comparison pointed that afforestation is the greatest contributor to extra water consumption, with 46.07% of contribution among different factors. These results illustrated that the significant declining supply and increasing consumption of water resource directly accelerate the decrease of downstream groundwater depth, and lead to a series of ecological problems in watershed scale. Because of the delivery feature of ecosystem, the effects of temporal accumulation and spatial tradeoff should be considered to avoid unexpected and irretrievable ecological consequences, especially when ecological restoration projects are implemented in watershed or larger scale.
Year: 2018