The effects of land consolidation on the ecological connectivity based on ecosystem service value: A case study of Da’an land consolidation project in Jilin province

Land consolidation has a profound impact on landscape patterns and ecological functions at various scales through engineering and biological measures. In recent years, China invests more than 100 billion RMB yuan on land consolidation each year. To understand how land consolidation affects landscape patterns and ecosystems, we investigated the ecosystem service value and the ecological connectivity in a consolidated area of Da’an city from 2008 to 2014 using a revised ecological connectivity index. The results indicated that land consolidation has certain negative influences on the ecosystem services in this area. The total ecosystem service value will decrease by nearly 30% in the late stage of consolidation. This decrease is caused by the loss of ecosystem service of the wetland and grassland, despite a sensible increase of cultivated land. In addition, land consolidation could change the ecological connectivity as well as the land use structure. Up to 85% of the entire area will be in low connectivity in the late stage of consolidation, representing a 6.23% increase in the total coverage compared to pre-consolidation. Finally, the different connectivity landscape and their key areas can be identified by the revised ecological connectivity index effectively. This study is helpful to trace out the relationships between landscape pattern and ecological process, and provides insights for ecological planning and designing of land consolidation in this area. We suggest that more attentions should be paid to improve the quality and ecosystem service value per unit area of the landscape, to establish ecological compensation mechanism of wetland losses, and to create the ecological corridors along the least accumulated impendence surface in the key areas during land consolidation.

[1]  Kong Fan,et al.  Developing green space ecological networks in Jinan City , 2008 .

[2]  Changshan Wu,et al.  Analyzing and modeling land use land cover change (LUCC) in the Daqing City, China , 2011 .

[3]  S. Saura,et al.  Comparison and development of new graph-based landscape connectivity indices: towards the priorization of habitat patches and corridors for conservation , 2006, Landscape Ecology.

[4]  Petr Sklenicka,et al.  APPLYING EVALUATION CRITERIA FOR THE LAND CONSOLIDATION EFFECT TO THREE CONTRASTING STUDY AREAS IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC , 2006 .

[5]  P. Ferreras.  Landscape structure and asymmetrical inter-patch connectivity in a metapopulation of the endangered Iberian lynx , 2001 .

[6]  F. Jordán,et al.  Characterizing the importance of habitat patches and corridors in maintaining the landscape connectivity of a Pholidoptera transsylvanica (Orthoptera) metapopulation , 2003, Landscape Ecology.

[7]  Jean Paul Metzger,et al.  Relative effects of fragment size and connectivity on bird community in the Atlantic Rain Forest: Implications for conservation , 2008 .

[8]  C. Allen,et al.  Viewpoint: Sustainability of pinon-juniper ecosystems - A unifying perspective of soil erosion thresholds , 1998 .

[9]  P. Sharma.  Ecology and environment , 2016 .

[10]  Xiong Chun.  Analysis of connectivity on greenland landscape in metropolitan region of Chongqing City , 2008 .

[11]  Santiago Saura,et al.  A new habitat availability index to integrate connectivity in landscape conservation planning : Comparison with existing indices and application to a case study , 2007 .

[12]  A. Tsoar,et al.  Landscape continuity analysis: A new approach to conservation planning in Israel , 2007 .

[13]  C. Krebs,et al.  Survival of dispersing versus philopatric juvenile snowshoe hares: do dispersers die? , 2000 .

[14]  Zhang Zheng-feng,et al.  Effects of land consolidation on ecological environment , 2007 .

[15]  M. Pintar,et al.  Conservation of natural ecosystems by land consolidation in the rural landscape , 2005 .

[16]  C. Lemmen,et al.  Land Consolidation and Land Readjustment for Sustainable Development - the Issues to Be Addressed , 2017 .

[17]  Maile C. Neel,et al.  Patch connectivity and genetic diversity conservation in the federally endangered and narrowly endemic plant species Astragalus albens (Fabaceae) , 2008 .

[18]  L. Fahrig,et al.  Connectivity is a vital element of landscape structure , 1993 .

[19]  Otso Ovaskainen,et al.  The metapopulation capacity of a fragmented landscape , 2000, Nature.

[20]  Liu Xiu-hua.  Eco-environment Impact Assessment on Land Consolidation Based on Entropy-weighted Matter-element Model——A Case Study of the Land Consolidation Project in Menglou Town,Laohekou City , 2009 .

[21]  Vida Maliene,et al.  Towards sustainable rural development in Central and Eastern Europe: Applying land consolidation , 2010 .

[22]  Edward A. Cook,et al.  Landscape structure indices for assessing urban ecological networks , 2002 .

[23]  Françoise Burel,et al.  The role of spatio-temporal patch connectivity at the landscape level: an example in a bird distribution , 1997 .

[24]  Timothy S. Hare,et al.  Using measures of cost distance in the estimation of polity boundaries in the Postclassic Yautepec valley, Mexico , 2004 .

[25]  Frank van Langevelde,et al.  Scale of habitat connectivity and colonization in fragmented nuthatch populations , 2000 .

[26]  J. Mallarach,et al.  Impact assessment of ecological connectivity at the regional level: recent developments in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area , 2006 .

[27]  James E Hines,et al.  Connectivity in an Agricultural Landscape as Reflected by Interpond Movements of a Freshwater Turtle , 2006, Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.

[28]  C. J. Álvarez,et al.  Economic, social and environmental impact ofland consolidation in Galicia , 2002 .