Regional Evaluating Paradigm for Ecological Services of Environment and Ecosystems

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  • 1. Department of Urban and Environmental Sciences; The Center for Land Studies; Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871;
    2. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101

Received date: 2001-07-05

  Revised date: 2001-11-20

  Online published: 2002-05-20

Abstract

Many researches recently have been focused on analyzing ecosystem services and evaluating natural capital stocks of environment and ecosystems due to their huge social welfares. According to methodological analysis, most of the evaluating researches belong to type paradigm, and some works failed to pay attention to spatial heterogeneity of ecological assets and its related factors. This paper, thus, attempts to calibrate those deviations and to present new paradigm for monetary evaluation of ecosystem services and its capital stocks. New paradigm that we proposed is a regional evaluating approach, which gives more considerations for spatial differentiation of environment and ecosystem than that of type paradigm. The features of new paradigm are as follows: (1) both on-site values and off-site values of ecosystems are equally incorporated; (2) the spatial patterns of scarcity of ecosystem and environment resources are considered; (3) the social demands for ecological assets, which are decided by socio-economic development level, are paid more attention to.As the application of new evaluating paradigm, the ecological assets of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau were assessed in this paper. Firstly, an eco-regionalization version Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for assessing ecological assets was developed, and then functional division of the research region was finished. Secondly, the spatial distribution and the relative value grades of ecosystems according to the previous data such as NPP and vegetation maps are determined. Finally, spatial pattern of environment and ecosystems’ natural value was identified by using GIS and modelling methods. In top hierarchy, the ecological assets of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are classified into 5 grades and 6 regions.Our researches show that regional evaluating paradigm is an alternative approach though it has some deficiencies. The next works will incorporate the integration between the type and regional assessment paradigms.

Cite this article

LI Shuang-cheng, ZHENG Du, ZHANG Yi-li . Regional Evaluating Paradigm for Ecological Services of Environment and Ecosystems[J]. SCIENTIA GEOGRAPHICA SINICA, 2002 , 22(3) : 270 -275 . DOI: 10.13249/j.cnki.sgs.2002.03.270

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