Quantifying sensitivity and exposure of multiple ecosystem services to climate change: A case study of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

        Global warming has imposed a positive or adverse impact on ecosystem services and it will be further amplified in vulnerable areas like Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. However, there is a limited understanding of spatial interaction among ecosystem services and their climatic drivers at a fine resolution, regardless of the historical or future periods. This study attempted to fill this gap by detecting sensitivity and exposure of ecosystem services to climate change based on spatial moving window method, combined with Modis-based satellite datasets and various future scenarios dataset. We found that Carbon Sequence and Oxygen Production (CSOP) and habitat quality experienced significant growth, while water retention (WR) showed a fluctuation trend on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. For CSOP, 56.94% of the pixels showed a positive sensitivity to climate change, which is nearly twice the ones with negative sensitivity (26.72%). And there is an evident positive sensitivity between WR and precipitation. Also, there is substantial spatial heterogeneity in the exposure of ecosystem services to future climate changes. A high-emission pathway (SSP5-8.5) increases the intensity of exposure on ecosystem services than low-emission pathway, and disturbances accompanied by future climate change at specific elevation intervals should not be ignored. Identifying spatial association among the ecosystem services and climatic drivers is helpful for targeted management and sustainable development of soil in the context of global warming.

Keywords

Ecosystem services, Climate change, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Sensitivity, Exposure