Balancing multiple ecosystem services in conservation priority setting

Conservation priority setting is the critical process of allocating the limited resources available for nature conservation and; safeguarding the sustainability of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ESs). It is difficult, however, to achieve the goal of simultaneously conserving both biodiversity and ESs, not only because of the potential trade-offs between biodiversity and ESs, but also because of the trade-offs between multiple ESs. Thus far, research has focused on the trade-offs between ESs caused by spatial competition resulting from land use change or by the destruction of biophysical interaction between multiple ESs. Few studies, however, have paid attention to the trade-offs induced during the decision-making process. Approaches for measuring the trade-offs between multiple ESs in decision-making processes would thus prove to be extremely helpful. In this paper, we map the water supply, soil conservation, and net primary production as ESs in the Jiangxi province of China in the year 2010, and use risk, tradeoff, and spatial efficiency indices to measure the conservation efficiency of seven established ordered weighted averaging (OWA) scenarios under two conservation levels (conserving the top ESs at 10 or 20 % of the area of the Jiangxi province). The main results are as follows: (1) conserving one ES may result in inefficient conservation of other ESs; and (2) conserving multiple ESs and the use of GIS-based OWA methods can balance conflicts among multiple ESs and can significantly enhance the spatial efficiency of the identified priority areas. Decision-makers may combine the spatial efficiency, risk and tradeoff levels of each OWA scenario with other specific conservation demands of their own specific cases in order to achieve the optimal identification of priority areas for the simultaneous conservation of multiple ESs.