Water Conservation Service Assessment and Its Spatiotemporal Features in National Key Ecological Function Zones

Abstract

In order to improve ecosystem service and protect nation ecology security, the government had designated lots of important ecosystem service protection areas, named national key ecological function zones (NKEFZ) in China. Water conservation service had been assessed with the help of multisource remote sensing data, and spatiotemporal features were analyzed from 2000 to 2014 in these ecological services zones. By assuming precipitation scenario as the constant, contribution for water conservation from human activities and climate change was analyzed, and result shows that, because of vegetation restoration by human activities, evapotranspiration increased obviously with the increase of the vegetation coverage. This could reduce the water conservation. However, actual annual increase of water conservation mainly comes from the increase of precipitation. Our analysis revealed that the choice of evaluation model played a decisive role in the reason analysis, which would affect the development of ecological policy.