[Ecological service assessment of human-dominated freshwater ecosystem with a case study in Yangzhou Prefecture, China.
Freshwater ecosystems provide a host of services to humanity. These services are now rapidly being lost, not least because of the inability of making the impacts measurable. To overcome this obstacle, assessment frameworks for freshwater ecosystem services are needed. A simple water equivalent framework to assess the ecological services provided by freshwater ecosystems was developed in this study. It translated the occupation of freshwater ecosystem services into biologically freshwater volumes and then compares this consumption to the freshwater throughput, that is, the ecological capacity available in this region. In this way, we use the example of Yangzhou Prefecture, to account the main categories of human occupation of water ecosystem services. The result showed that there is a huge gap between the consumption and the supply of freshwater ecosystem services. This must encourage local government to make land-use and water management decisions both economically rational and environmentally sound.
Ye
Ya-Ping
YP
Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China. yapingye@hotmail.com
Wang
Ru-Song
RS
Ren
Jing-Ming
JM
Hu
Dan
D
Yuan
Shao-Jun
SJ
Wang
Min
M
D002681:China; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D005398:Fisheries; D005618:Fresh Water; D006802:Human Activities; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors