Predicting the joint effects of future climate and land use change on ecosystem health in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

Climate and land use change (CLUC) have a far-reaching influence on the ecosystem. Regional ecosystem health, which is the direct and comprehensive reflection of evaluating regional ecosystem quality, has been significantly affected by these changes. However, existing studies mainly focused on the influences of climate or land use change on ecosystem structure, functions, or services, few studies have explored and predicted their joint impacts on regional ecosystem health. In this study, to fill this gap, we proposed a simulation framework to predict the joint impact of future climate and land use change on ecosystem health under the different representative concentration pathways (RCP) scenarios based on the integration of FLUS (Future Land Use Simulation) model and ecosystem health assessment model. The Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River Economic Belt was taken as the study area to examine the prediction framework and identify relationships between future climate and land use change and ecosystem health index (EHI) during the period of 2015-2030. The prediction results show that the EHI in the north of the study area and urban agglomeration areas would suffer marked decrease under the joint influence of future climate and land use changes, indicating that these areas will likely to become the key conservation areas for future ecological protection and management. Additionally, predicted the future CLUC will result in a significant increase in EHI in more than 58% regions under the RCP 2.6 and RCP 4.5 scenarios from 2015 to 2030, whereas 74.87% areas would suffer the decrease of EHI under the RCP 8.5. From the perspective of regional development, the RCP 4.5 scenario can provide a compromise solution for tackling future climate and land use change to ensure the ecological conservation and economic development. Moreover, the direct impact of future climate change on ecosystem health will not be significant in the short term, while the indirect impact of future land use change will play a leading role in the joint influence. Furthermore, the flexible multi-model coupled prediction framework of this study provides a promising method for better predicting the joint impact of future climate and land use changes on regional ecosystem health, it can also be applied to explore the joint impact of these change on other ecological environment. Most importantly, the prediction results can provide scientific suggestions for ecological conservation, management and regional development.