Responses of ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies in Guangfo Metropolitan Area to multidimensional expansion of urban space.

Abstract

Understanding the responses of ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies in metropolitan areas to the multidimensional expansion of urban space is of great significance for the optimization of regional land spatial pattern and high-quality development. With the Guangfo Metropolitan Area as research region, we used land use data and natural ecological environment data from 2000 to 2020 to measure the expansion characteristics of urban space in the dimensions of scale, distribution, and morphology by using the landscape pattern indices. We further calculated four main ecosystem services: urban cooling, habitat quality, recreation, and water conservation by the InVEST model, quantified the trade-off and synergistic relationship of multiple ecosystem services by the coupling coordination degree model, and explored its response to multidimensional urban spatial expansion by using the multi-scale geographically weighted regression model. The results showed that urban land use scale in the Guangfo Metropolitan Area continued to increase from 2000 to 2020, with an accelerated growth rate from 2010 to 2020. The ave-rage patch area of urban land in the central area and the urban land of small patches in the northeast increased, evolving from a "dual-center" structure to a "single-center" one. The distance between urban land patches in the Guangfo Metropolitan Area was relatively small, indicating a compact distribution of urban land. The distance between newly developed urban land patches was also small, but had gradually increased in recent years. The patch shape of urban land was relatively regular and less complex, but the complexity of the newly added urban land gra-dually increased. The ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies in the Guangfo Metropolitan Area had undergone significant changes, with a decrease in synergies and an increase in trade-off, and extreme trade-offs had gradually become dominant. The response of ecosystem services synergies to changes in urban land use scale was the most intense and had spatial heterogeneity, while the response to the change of distribution and morphological characte-ristics of urban land showed periodic differences.