Assessment on Ecological Services Using Trends of Net Primary Productivity: A Case Study of Shennongjia Forest Reserve

Abstract

The forest ecosystem is one of the most important ecosystems on earth, it is necessary to assess the related ecological services. Taking the Shennongjia forest reserve as a case, this paper assesses the ecological services during the period from 2009 to 2019, by using trends of Net Primary Productivity. The assessments take China's Ecological Red-Line Policies into account. The results show that: (i) the overall ecological services shows a trend of firstly decreasing, then increasing, then declining and finally stabilizing; the trend is also roughly the same for each town in the reserve; the overall ecological services have gradually improved and stabilized in recent years; (ii) there is significant heterogeneity in ecological service importance spatial distribution, and services are different from each other; (iii) in terms of autocorrelation, the global Moran's I index is greater than 2.8, showing a significant positive spatial correlation.