Ecological service assessment of human-dominated freshwater ecosystem with a case study in Yangzhou Prefecture, China

Article type: Research Article

Authors: YE, Ya-ping | WANG, Ru-song | REN, Jing-ming | HU, Dan | YUAN, Shao-jun | WANG, Min

Affiliations: Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Freshwater ecosystems provide a host of services to humanity. These services are now rapidly being lost, not least because of the inability of making the impacts measurable. To overcome this obstacle, assessment frameworks for freshwater ecosystem services are needed. A simple water equivalent framework to assess the ecological services provided by freshwater ecosystems was developed in this study. It translated the occupation of freshwater ecosystem services into biologically freshwater volumes and then compares this consumption to the freshwater throughput, that is, the ecological capacity available in this region. In this way, we use the example of Yangzhou Prefecture, to account the main categories of human occupation of water ecosystem services. The result showed that there is a huge gap between the consumption and the supply of freshwater ecosystem services. This must encourage local government to make land-use and water management decisions both economically rational and environmentally sound.

Keywords: freshwater ecosystems, services, human impacts, assessment, water equivalent, Yangzhou Prefecture

Journal: Journal of Environmental Sciences, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 755-761, 2004