Assessing the effects of vegetation cover changes on resource utilization and conservation from a systematic analysis aspect

How to improve the utilization efficiency of natural resources and control environmental impacts is one of the key steps to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A multi-dimensional approach integrating landscape and systematic analysis might be a good way to address this issue. In this study, three main ecosystems and six vegetation cover changes on the Loess Plateau (LP) from 2000 to 2015 were selected to clarify their impacts on resource utilization and conservation in three environmental regions based on landscape-level remote sensing data and an emergy-based thermodynamic system processing model. The evapotranspiration empower was regarded as the system emergy utilization, with the structure and function of the ecosystem being divided into resource utilization efficiency and environmental impacts. Results showed that (1) Forest could reinforce production by improving the water and soil conservation in water erosion region, although it had a lower water utilization efficiency than other ecosystems. (2) Grassland was more suitable than forest in the water-limited wind and wind-water erosion regions, with a higher water utilization efficiency and higher resource conservation. These results suggested that maximum resource acquisition is not always the optimal strategy for the development of ecosystems, especially in a resource-limited environment. The maximum empower principle could be a general principle to drive ecosystem development at a regional scale. Expanding cultivated land in the wind-water erosion region might be a choice for the sustainable increase of grain production in the LP. By incorporating the main characteristics of the major issues concerned in the studied area into the ecosystem processes and landscape integration model, the new multi-dimensional method has a good application potential in guiding land use planning and decision making in ecological fragile areas, like but not limited to the LP.