Unveiling Decoupled Social-Ecological Networks of Great Lake Basin: An Ecosystem Services Approach

Abstract

With the backdrop of climate change and human activities, the complex interactions within the social-ecological system have brought unprecedented challenges to sustainable development. However, there is still a lack of quantitative methods for analyzing the dynamics of the social-ecological system. Here, we introduced a social-ecological network approach incorporating supply and demand of ecosystem services (ESs) as bridges and took the Dongting Lake basin in China as the research area. From 2000 to 2020, we discovered that the number of linkages among meteorological elements and ESs supply decreased from 5 to 0. Along with this, the network density (from 26 to 22) and network connectivity (from 43 to 28) showed the decoupling trends of the social-ecological networks. These results implied the decreasing impacts of meteorological elements and the importance of considering human activities impacts. Based on the average degree analysis of the networks, proportions of cultivated land and forest land were key for ESs supply (both around 0.900), while population density and artificial land proportion were important for the ESs demand (around 0.850 and 0.800, respectively). More management practices are required because these elements have significant impacts on the supply-demand alignments of multiple ESs. We further illustrated the spatial supply-demand mismatches of ESs, along with the negative effects of urbanization. This study highlighted the advantage of integrating the ecosystems services approach into the social-ecological network analysis, and provided policy insights serving for sustainable development of the typical great lake basins.