Impacts of Urban Expansion Forms on Ecosystem Services in Urban Agglomerations: A Case Study of Shanghai-Hangzhou Bay Urban Agglomeration

Exploring impacts of urban expansion on ecosystem services has become a hot topic for regional sustainable development, while analyzing the ecological effects of urban expansion forms under different expansion intensities and city sizes is relatively rare. Therefore, taking a typical urban agglomeration, Shanghai-Hangzhou Bay Urban Agglomeration, as a case study, this study first analyzed the dynamics of urban expansion forms (leapfrogging, edge-expansion, and infilling) and four critical ecosystem services (carbon sequestration, food supply, habitat quality, and soil retention) in three periods from 1990 to 2019. The multiple linear regression model and zonal statistics analysis model were used to quantitatively identify the impacts of urban expansion forms on ecosystem services, taking into account different expansion intensities and city sizes. The results showed that the urban expansion trend in the study area experienced a morphological change from integration to diffusion and then to integration in 1990–2019; edge-expansion was the dominant expansion form. Food supply decreased continuously while other ecosystem services had fluctuating changes, and they all had spatial heterogeneity. The leapfrogging, edge-expansion, and infilling all had negative impacts on ecosystem services, and among them, the edge-expansion intensity had the highest influence degree in the early expansion, and the leapfrogging intensity occupied the dominant position in all influences with the expansion of urban scales. For different city sizes, the impact of edge-expansion in large-scale cities was greater than in small-scale cities in the early expansion, and the impact of leapfrogging in large-scale cities exceeded the edge-expansion in the subsequent expansion. These findings will help further understand the influential mechanisms between urban expansion and ecosystem services and provide a scientific basis for formulating reasonable urban planning.