Abstract:
Ecosystem services (ES) are benefits that humans derive directly or indirectly from ecosystems, which make connections between human and nature and between the science and management decisions closely. Thus, it is of great significance of comprehensive recognition of the human activities impacts on the ecosystems for making the regional developments harmoniously and sustainably. With impacts on the change of land use and terrestrial ecosystems, land consolidation has been one of the hugest organized human activities in China. Deeply affecting regional and national land use patterns and ecological processes, land consolidation significant influences ES. Based on the introduction of the relationships between land consolidation and ES, this paper summarized the impacts of the land consolidation on ES indirect through changing the types, structures and patterns of the land use/cover, and the direct impacts of its engineering features such as land leveling, irrigation and drainage on the different ES types including provision, regulation, support and cultural services as both positive and negative existing. This paper also summarized the impacts of land consolidation on those ES relationships with synergy/trade-off, as the scale effects of these impacts revealed the scale dependence. The future prospects were suggested of the research on the impacts of land consolidation on ES as follows:(1) Enhancing the study on the impacts of land consolidation on the ecosystem structures and processes, to develop the method and models of the land consolidation impacts on the ecological processes and functions; (2) Highlighting the study on the ESs and their relationships, based on the main thread of the land consolidation affecting the ecosystem structures and functions, the ES and its regulations; (3) Focusing on the integration and optimization of regional ESs, to regulate the key ES spatio-temporal patterns scientifically with land consolidation; (4) Paying more attention to the scale effects of the impacts of land consolidation, as well as its coupling mechanism at different scales. It is expected to improve the research of ESs affected by land consolidation, and scientific basis will be provided for the management decision-making to integrate ESs evaluation into land consolidation.