Ecological risk assessment based on terrestrial ecosystem services in China

The ecological risk assessment was previously explored according to ecological entity characteristics, such as point source threat and regional landscape pattern change, and ignored the factors related to the human well-being. The academic contribution of the essay is to integrate ecosystem services into assessment system of ecological risk in a new perspective. In this paper, the spatial mapping of ecosystem services on China's land is reconstructed with the aid of GIS and RS. Moreover, the ecological risk analysis model is established in order to quantitatively expound the spatial pattern of the ecological risk based on ecosystem services, and identify ecological risk control priority regions at different confidence levels. The results showed that: (1) From 2000 to 2010, the average annual value of total terrestrial ecosystem services index in China was between 0-2.17, and slightly fluctuated between 0.30-0.57 over the years. Some 24.7% of the regions with significantly increasing value included Taiwan, Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, inland Xinjiang of northwest China, 37.1% of the regions with significantly decreasing value, including northeast China, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, central and eastern regions of China; (2) The risk losses of ecosystem services were exposed to different situations under different confidence levels. When the confidence level was 90%, the potential loss ratio of the total ecosystem services index was 24.19%, and the ecological risk index was 0.253. Furthermore, by analyzing the relationship between confidence level and ecological risk index, when the confidence level was high, the probability of risk was reduced correspondingly, but the losses correspondingly increased when risk occurred; (3) We investigated the scenario as an example under the 90% confidence level. The different eco-regions with the risk characteristics are as follows: the top six eco-regions with average ecosystem services risk index are Inner Mongolia Plateau, North China Plain, Loess Plateau, Northeast China Plain, Hengduan Mountain Region, and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The proportions of the eco-regions with extreme risk are 55.89%, 26.63%, 24.35%, 20.62%, 18.70% and 25.12%, respectively. © 2019, Science Press. All right reserved.