Spatiotemporal Response Relationships Between Changes in Water Conservation Service and Landscape Pattern in Zoige Plateau, China

Abstract

Understanding the link between landscape pattern and water conservation service (WCS) is crucial for effective water resource conservation and landscape planning. However, the impact of landscape configuration on WCS remains unclear. This study explored the spatiotemporal relationships between WCS and landscape pattern in the Zoige Plateau (ZP), a vital waterhead of the yellow river, from 1990 to 2020. The results showed that woodland and high‐coverage grassland exhibited the highest WCS capacity and contributed the greatest to total WCS, suggesting the importance of protecting coverage and area of woodland and grassland. From 1990 to 2020, the areas of high‐ and medium‐coverage grasslands significantly decreased, implying adverse effects of landscape composition changes on ZP's WCS during the past few decades. The effects of landscape configuration metrics on WCS exhibited significant variability across years, climate scenarios and regions, highlighting the significant role of climatic and underlying surface. Under realistic climatic scenarios, for greater WCS, in most parts of the western and northern ZP, which negatively correlated with aggregation index, patch density, and mean fractal dimension index but positively correlated with shannon's diversity index, it is better to increase the proportion of large patches, reduce landscape fragmentation, and maintain diverse patch types. Conversely, in southeastern part of the central ZP, where WCS showed an opposite correlation with the aforementioned metrics, maintaining simpler patch type diversity and higher landscape connectivity may be useful. These findings provided important insights for identifying sensitive areas where landscape pattern changes affect WCS and optimizing landscapes to sustain ZP's WCS.