Assessing landscape fragmentation effects on ecosystem services in a semi-arid mountainous environment: A case study on abha watershed, saudi arabia

Abstract

The effect of land use land cover (LULC) change is well documented, but the impact of landscape fragmentation on Ecosystem Service Value (ESV) has not been quantitatively explored yet in the study area. The present study designed to evaluate the landscape fragmentation effect of Abha watershed, Saudi Arabia, a new method was proposed by integrating the ESV with the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and landscape fragmentation model. Results of LULC dynamics showed that urban area has increased significantly by 1648.8 hectares (ha) to 6379.2 ha from 1990 to 2018. While the scrubland has covered a half (15173.6 ha) of the total study area (37001.08 ha) in 1990, but it was significantly reduced to 8907.93 ha in 2018. The calculated ESV of dense vegetation was 0.2 million dollars/year, according to the results of the integrated ESV model, but it was 2 million dollars/year using the initial coefficient in 2018. In 2018, the estimated ESV for water bodies using AHP's integrated ESV model was 7 times lower than the estimated ESV with an initial coefficient That is, a declining trend was discovered after integrating landscape fragmentation for ESV estimation in this study area.