Processes and driving forces for changing vegetation ecosystem services: Insights from the Shaanxi Province of China

It is of great significance in the management of vegetation ecosystems to assess the spatial-temporal dynamics and the interactions of vegetation ecosystem services under the influence of climate change and human activities. In this study, based on different validated spatial models, we estimated three key ecosystem services: soil conservation (SC), net primary production (NPP) and water yield (WY) of Shaanxi Province from 2000 to 2013. Then NPP is used as an indicator to identify the driving forces of vegetation ecosystem changes. We also quantified how climate changes and human activities affect the interactions among ecosystem services. The results showed that all three ecosystem services in Shaanxi Province increased from 2000 to 2013. Human activities contributed the most to the vegetation ecosystem restoration (45.8%), followed by the climate factors (38.0%) and the joint factors (both climate and human factors, 16.2%). The degradation ascribable to climate factors accounted for 74.1% of the degraded areas. The joint factors and human activities caused 16.8% and 9.1% of the degradation, respectively. The interactions among three key ecosystem services showed obvious differences in different driving scenarios. The restoration of vegetation ecosystems ascribable solely to climate or human activities is hard to meet the needs of the synergic development of various ecosystem services. We therefore recommend that in future policy-making in regional ecosystem management, more attention should be paid to maintaining the balance between local ecosystem resource demands and ecosystem restoration in order to maximize the benefits of ecological restoration programs and improve ecosystem services synergistically.