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Linking ecological resilience and ecosystem services to inform spatial conservation planning

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Abstract

Balancing ecosystem service provision with long-term ecosystem stability remains a critical challenge for sustainable land management. Here, we develop a spatial planning framework that integrates ecological resilience—the capacity of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations—with ecosystem services to identify priority areas for ecological restoration. Applying this framework to the Loess Plateau of China, we evaluate three management strategies—Service Priority, Balanced Priority, and Resilience Priority—to delineate restoration priorities. Our results indicate that ecosystem services have generally improved from 2000 to 2020, while resilience exhibits a turning point, shifting from an increasing to a declining trend. Spatial overlay analyses further show that areas with enhanced ecosystem service supply coincide with declining resilience, indicating a spatial mismatch between service gains and resilience loss. The three prioritization scenarios produce distinct spatial patterns, highlighting the importance of balanced strategies that reconcile short-term service gains with long-term ecosystem resilience to inform sustainable restoration and land management.

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Data availability

Monthly NDVI data with a resolution of 1 km from February 2000 to December 2023 were acquired from MODIS (MOD13A3 Version 6.1, https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/catalog/lpcloud-mod13a3-061). Land use/cover data with a 30 m resolution in 2000 and 2020 was obtained from Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/15853565)58. The datasets supporting the findings of this study, including ecosystem service and resilience assessment results, have been deposited in figshare and are available at [https://figshare.com/s/d6d5d65bbd9e77a02441].

Code availability

The code used for the study is available from the author’s figshare repository (https://figshare.com/s/d6d5d65bbd9e77a02441).

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42501114, W2412141), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202506004), Young Talent Fund of Xi’an Association for Science and Technology (0959202513114).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography and Tourism, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China

    Zhuangzhuang Wang, Liwei Zhang, Lei Jiao, Hao Wang & Ying Luo

  2. State Key Laboratory of Regional and Urban Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Bojie Fu & Junze Zhang

  3. National Observation and Research Station of Earth Critical Zone on the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi, Xi’an, China

    Bojie Fu

  4. Shaanxi Yan’an Forest Ecosystem Observation and Research Station, Beijing, China

    Bojie Fu

  5. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Xutong Wu & Shuai Wang

  6. Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Yingjie Li

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  1. Zhuangzhuang Wang
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Contributions

B.F. and Z.W. conceived and designed the study. Z.W. produced and analyzed the results and led the writing of the manuscript. B.F., X.W., S.W., J.Z., L.Z., L.J., H.W., Y.L., and Y.L. commented and edited the manuscript. All authors contributed to interpreting the results and improving the paper.

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Correspondence to
Bojie Fu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Communications Earth & Environment thanks Xiangyang Hou and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Letícia Santos de Lima and Mengjie Wang. A peer review file is available

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Wang, Z., Fu, B., Wu, X. et al. Linking ecological resilience and ecosystem services to inform spatial conservation planning.
Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03244-1

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