Unlocking the Ecological Blueprint: Strategic Zoning and Policy Guidelines for Ecosystem Services in Guangdong Province, China

Abstract

Ecosystem services (ESs) exhibit significant spatial heterogeneity due to various environmental and human-related factors. Understanding these spatial patterns and their drivers is crucial for zoning and managing ESs, providing essential information for planning decisions aligned with the principles of ecological civilization. However, existing zoning methods often overlook spatial heterogeneity and lack in-depth exploration of the spatial nonstationarity of different factors, hindering tailored urban ecological management and planning. This study addresses these gaps by evaluating the importance of major ecosystem services in Guangdong Province, China, from 2000 to 2018. We used the root mean square error to measure the trade-off intensity of ecosystem services and employed the multiscale geographically weighted regression method to characterize ecological sensitivity. Finally, biodiversity indicators were introduced, and a combination of the self-organizing feature map neural network and fuzzy C-means clustering method was used for ecological zoning. The results indicate the following: (1) there are significant north–south disparities in the provision of ecosystem services in Guangdong Province, with weaker services in the southern regions—high-value trade-off areas are primarily concentrated in the northern part of Guangdong, with forest land exhibiting the highest trade-off intensity; (2) precipitation and vegetation indexes are strong drivers affecting water yield and productivity, while urbanization and landscape metrics impact carbon storage and habitat quality, with urban fringe areas being the most sensitive; (3) the study area can be divided into six zones, namely, Core Ecological Protection Zones, Important Ecological Protection Zones, General Ecological Protection Zones, Ecological Function Coordination Zones, Urban Expansion Zones, and Urban Optimization Zones, with specific ecological regulation strategies proposed for each zone. This study provides a data-driven foundation for implementing sustainable management strategies in ecologically diverse regions and offers insights that can be generalized to other regions facing similar ecological challenges, contributing to the broader field of ecosystem service management and planning.