Impact of local industry expansion on farmland ecosystem services: A case study of farmland-factories in Changhua County, Taiwan

As is known to everyone, the preservation of agricultural landscape plays a crucial role in productivity, sustainability and other ecosystem services of agricultural systems. In Taiwan, there was a disgraceful history between the sprawl of factories and farmland preservation. With the expansion of Cities’ boundaries, it formed a skyrocketing wave of urban sprawl at the fringe of urbanized area in the 1960s. It created a prevailing phenomenon in rural area in Taiwan called “ Non-Agricultural Use on Farmland “, which means landuse that violates against the current law, such as manufactories and houses. These human activities severely deteriorate the landscape and the quality of agricultural products in Taiwan. However, with the awareness of the importance of ecosystem services, people in Taiwan are no longer satisfied with nowadays policy-making process. They are asking to take ecosystem-value into consideration in policy formulation and spatial planning processes. Yet, current spatial planning policies rarely include the value of ecosystem services in the assessment process, which result in biases in policy evaluation and detract from the output of ecosystem services and human well-being.

Therefore, in order to incorporate the ecosystem service assessment into the process of spatial planning policy, this study will first evaluate the ecosystem services through the InVEST model and identify the spatial pattern of ecosystem services through spatial autocorrelation. In our research, we select four modules that is consider to be most relevant to the preservation of farmland landscape through literature review, which includes:  “Carbon Storage and Sequestration”, ”Habitat Quality”, ”Annual Water Yield”, ”Sediment Delivery Ratio”. Then, by modifying the spatial pattern of the ecosystem services into criteria settings, this thesis simulates the change of the overall ecosystem services and the hotspots in different scenarios of farmland control policies. In order to further assess the spatial relevance of farmland-factory management policies to ecosystem services, this study use spatial autocorrelation to assess the location of ecosystem services and to identify a reasonable and effective farmland management strategy.

Primitive analysis points out that the demolition of the farmland-factory will have positive effects on multiple ecosystem services. We verify several scenarios including the scenarios that consider the spatial pattern, take hot spots of selected ecosystem services modules into consideration, the other that consider “ growth management ” and still the one that consider ongoing governmental policies. However, the output of ecosystem services and spatial pattern are different due to the spatial structure of the research environment and the physical status. Some of the ecosystem services show obvious result that they are affected by the spatial structure or by physical environment, and there are still some results showing no significant difference. This paper try to demonstrate and provide information in the process of farmland-factory management policy. The findings of this article can be applied to policies that concerned of landscaping preservation planning and management, providing a GIS-based and Scenario-based method of ecosystem services assessment, which we hope to construct a harmonious policy framework for landscape preservation and industry expansion