Identifying the impacts of landscape structure on ecosystem services trade-offs among ecosystem services bundles in the mountains of Southwest China

Environmental Managers strive to enhance synergistic provisioning of ecosystem services (ESs) by optimizing landscape structure. However, understanding the impact of landscape structure on ESs trade-offs relationships from ESs bundles perspective is inadequate, particularly in distinguishing the relative contributions of landscape compositions and configurations. To fill this gap, taking the Southwest (SW) China as an example, this study quantified five relevant provisioning and regulating services, including grain production (GP), water retention (WR), carbon sequestration (CS), soil retention (SR), and habitat quality (HQ), based on biological models; analyzed the trade-offs/synergies relationships among ESs through Pearson correlation and bivariate spatial autocorrelation; further identified ESs bundles and explored the relationship between ESs trade-offs and landscape structure with the help of self-organizing map (SOM) method and redundancy analysis (RDA). Our results showed land use types influenced the spatial distribution of the five ESs, with the dominant land use in hotspot areas being forest land, and in coldspot areas being farmland and grassland. Four ESs bundles were identified based on spatial differentiation and internal structure characteristics. In the entire SW, the regulating services showed synergistic relationships with each other. However, a few trade-offs existed in different bundles (e.g., WR-CS and WR-SR in bundle 1; GP-HQ and GP-WR in bundle 2; GP-SR in bundle 3; GP-CS in bundles 4). Landscape compositions showed a stronger influence on ESs trade-offs than landscape configuration. The area proportion of woodland contributed the most to ESs in the entire SW and within bundle 1–3, while the area proportion of cultivated land was the main driver of ESs within bundle 4, indicating there was scale dependence in the relationship between landscape composition and ESs. The findings can propose targeted management measures for regional ecosystems to enhance human welfare and achieve regional high-quality development.