Responses of Ecosystem Services to Climate Change: A Case Study of the Loess Plateau

Abstract

Exploring the responses of ecosystem services to climate change is an essential prerequisite for understanding the global climate change impact on terrestrial ecosystems and their modeling. This study first evaluated the ecosystem services including net primary productivity (NPP), soil conservation (SC) and water yield (WY), and climate factors including precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation from 2000 to 2020 on the Loess Plateau, and then analyzed their relationships and threshold effects. The results found that precipitation in the region had significantly increased since 2000 while solar radiation decreased; mean annual temperature however did not change significantly. NPP and SC showed an increasing trend while WY showed a decreasing trend. The most significant climate factor affecting ESs was precipitation. With the increase of precipitation, all three types of ecosystem services showed a significant increasing trend, but the facilitating effect for NPP and WY began to be weakened when precipitation reached the thresholds of 490 mm and 600 mm, respectively. This occurred because in regions with already sufficient precipitation to support NPP there is limited capacity for NPP to increase compared to areas of arid grasslands. In these regions, high vegetation cover leads to increased evapotranspiration which reduces the positive influence of increasing precipitation on WY. The results can offer a reference for the level of ecological restoration success.