Identifying the priority areas for enhancing the ecosystem services in hilly and mountainous areas of southern China

Ecosystem services can be enhanced through ecological restoration, industrial structure adjustment, land-use optimization, and agricultural and forestry ecosystem transformation. The ecosystem services in hilly and mountainous areas of southern China are crucially needed to be enhanced since these regions are important ecological functional zones in China. However, due to its large area, it is not possible to simultaneously upgrade the ecosystem services for all areas, and therefore, priority areas need to be selected to individually upgrade the ecosystem service function. In this study, via an approach of combining remote sensing, geographic information system, and spatial statistics, we identify the priority areas that need to be upgraded based on the analysis of ecological sensitivity, importance of ecosystem service function, and decreased degree in ecosystem services. For five counties in hilly and mountainous areas of southern China, only less than 2% of the total area was identified as the first priority area; its land-use compositions were analyzed and recommendations on how to enhance ecosystem service were suggested. This approach overcomes the conflict and contradiction issues associated with identifying priority areas in previous studies and solves the problems of high cost or difficult implementation of priority areas.