School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, Beijing, China.
Policy Research Center for Environment and Economy, Ministry of Ecology and Environmental, Beijing, China.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Oct 15;320:115915. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.115915. Epub 2022 Aug 8.
Conservation and restoration have long been regarded as two separate management avenues to maintain or enhance ecosystem functioning. Despite the commonalities in goals, restoration is generally considered a lower priority than conservation due to its generally greater cost, uncertainties in multiple trajectories and deals with already degraded habitats. However, when resources and opportunities for meeting conservation needs are limited, restoration could be an imperative avenue to provide additional benefits from conservation. The priority of conservation and restoration should be integrated based on an identical framework cost effectively to obtain the maximum ecological benefits with minimal costs. We propose a methodological framework to integrate conservation and restoration based on theories of Systematic Conservation Planning, which could identify best integrated conservation and restoration pattern in a cost-effective way on the basis of the provisions of multiple ecosystem services (i.e., carbon storage, water yield, soil retention and habitat quality). The trade-offs among four ecosystem services are assessed with an each of 10% increment in the target levels of ecosystem services. We demonstrated our approach at a regional scale, in the Dongting Lake Area, China. Our results showed that conservation is prioritized in a higher proportion of the study area when the targets are low. When the target level became higher, restoration gained more importance with growing area. This highlights that restoration pattern is indispensable when target setting become high and the integrated conservation and restoration planning is more cost efficient than that of conservation alone. Improving the carbon storage and soil retention would also contribute greatly to an increase in other ecosystems, but increasing the water yield and habitat quality would not guarantee an improvement for others. Integrated conservation and restoration planning will facilitate refine target achievement of conservation and restoration recommendations, by the trade-offs between conservation and restoration, and among different ecosystem services, our prioritization framework provides a useful insight in implementing the integrated planning, which can improve the efficiency in increasing ecosystem services compared to use either conservation or restoration ways.
保护和修复长期以来一直被视为维护或增强生态系统功能的两种独立管理途径。尽管目标相似，但由于修复的成本通常更高，多条轨迹存在不确定性，且涉及已经退化的栖息地，因此修复通常被认为比保护的优先级低。然而，当满足保护需求的资源和机会有限时，修复可能是提供额外保护效益的必要途径。应根据相同的框架有效地整合保护和修复的优先级，以最小的成本获得最大的生态效益。我们提出了一种基于系统保护规划理论的整合保护和修复的方法框架，可以在满足多种生态系统服务（即碳储存、产水量、土壤保持和生境质量）的规定的基础上，以经济有效的方式确定最佳的综合保护和修复模式。我们以中国洞庭湖地区为研究区域，评估了四种生态系统服务之间的权衡关系，即在目标生态系统服务水平提高 10%的情况下进行评估。我们的结果表明，当目标较低时，保护在研究区域的较高比例中被优先考虑。当目标水平提高时，随着面积的增加，修复变得更加重要。这表明，当目标设定较高且综合保护和修复规划比单独保护更具成本效益时，修复模式是不可或缺的。提高碳储存和土壤保持能力也将极大地促进其他生态系统的增长，但增加产水量和生境质量并不能保证其他生态系统的改善。通过权衡保护和修复之间以及不同生态系统服务之间的关系，综合保护和修复规划将有助于更精确地实现保护和修复建议的目标，我们的优先级框架提供了一个有用的见解，即实施综合规划，与单独使用保护或修复方法相比，可以提高增加生态系统服务的效率。
