Economical assessment of forest ecosystem services in China: Characteristics and implications

China is an important country in the world in terms of forestry and the function of its forest ecosystem. It is an essential issue to account the value of the forest ecosystem services (FESs) of China in both ecological economy and environmental policy making. However, a big challenge exists because of the variety in climate types, forest vegetation, and silvicultural measures. In the current study, the monetary value of some important China's FESs, such as water conservation, soil conservation, carbon sequestration and oxygen release, nutrient accumulation, atmosphere environment purification, and biodiversity conservation, was estimated to be about 10.01 trillion RMB/year (1.48 trillion US dollars/year) in 2008, wherein the largest fraction was water conservation (40.51%). A four-fold variation used to exist in the FESs per unit area by the provinces which are geographically used as assessing units. This value of FESs was about 33% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of China in 2008. The values of FESs are unevenly distributed across the country, decoupling from GDP among different provinces. The value of China's FESs will continue to have a fast increasing trend due to massive forestation in the future decades. Beyond that, it is clear that how much ecological benefits human obtained from forest, what kind of ecological benefits offered by forest, and which are predominant or potential FESs types in province under different natural and social conditions according to ecological location quotient (ELQ). Compared with the Engel's coefficient (EC) of individual and the willingness to pay index (WTP) of governmental to FESs, we can conclude that insofar as we have a thorough understanding of the value and functions of FESs, and bring the government WTP and individual EC into full play, and promote the high environmental protection consciousness, it will have large potential WTP for improving the environment quality based on the low level WTP of the government in reality. Moreover, these results show important implications in making a policy for ecological complementary on the national scale in China and in assessing FESs in other countries, and will be useful to scientists, managers, policy makers and people who are concerned with relationship between human and natural systems.