The spatio-temporal trade-off between ecosystem and basic public services and the urbanization driving force in the rapidly urbanizing region

With continuous urbanization and population growth, the socio-ecological demands of urban and rural residents have been increasingly intensive and diverse. Such demands need to be met by the ecosystem service (ES) provided by natural capital and the basic public service (BPS) provided by social capital together. However, the ES-BPS trade-off and the driving forces have not been fully revealed, which hinders the synergetic management of the ES and BPS. Therefore, we took the Middle and Lower Reach of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, one of the regions undergoing rapid urbanization in China, as the case study area, and explored the spatio-temporal ES-BPS trade-off and the urbanization driving forces during 2005 to 2019. We first quantified and mapped multiple ESs and BPSs, and then quantified the ES-BPS trade-off over the study period. Finally, we used geographically weighted regression model to reveal how three urbanization features (land, population, and economic urbanization) influenced the ES-BPS trade-off. We found that each ES and BPS, and the comprehensive ES and BPS (the overall capacity to provide multiple ESs and BPSs separately) all exhibited uneven spatial distributions. Results indicated that most eastern prefectures showed decreases in the comprehensive ES but great increases in the comprehensive BPS. Moreover, the ES-BPS trade-off in 2005 exhibited a pattern where the values were high in the south but low in the north, while such an interregional difference was weakened by 2019. From 2005 to 2019, the hotspots of ES-BPS trade-off changes appeared in Shanghai municipality and its surrounding areas, while the coldspots were mainly located in the southern part of Zhejiang Province. Although the influence degree of the three urbanization features on the ES-BPS trade-off spatially varied, population and economic urbanization continuously mitigated the ES-BPS trade-off but land urbanization exacerbated the trade-offs for the whole region. Overall, our study can contribute to the understanding of the ES-BPS relationship and its driving forces, which can support synergetic ES-BPS management in regions undergoing rapid urbanization.