The impact of urbanization on ecosystem services: Both time and space are important to identify driving forces

Rapid urbanization is one of the key factors in threatening regional ecological security and undermining human well-being. Understanding of the impacts of urbanization on ecosystem services (ESs) could provide comprehensive information for policy making to support ecological governance. In this study, the spatial and temporal distributions of four ESs, namely water yield (WY), soil conservation (SC), nitrogen export (NE), and habitat quality (HQ), and four factors of urbanization, namely construction land percentage, economic density, population density, and nighttime lighting, were analyzed in the Xiangjiang River Basin (XJRB) from 1990 to 2020. The impacts of urbanization on ESs at the sub-watershed and county level were investigated using the space-for-time and change-over-time methods. The results showed that: (1) WY, SC, and NE fluctuated throughout the study period, while HQ significantly decreased and urbanization factors significantly increased. (2) Each urbanization factor had a significant influence on the spatial heterogeneity of ESs, with the contribution at the county level being 2.88%-56.11% higher than that at the sub-watershed level. Moreover, there were enhanced interactions between factors in general, although spatial heterogeneity effects on NE and HQ were weaker at the county level. (3) Urbanization and ESs had a significant nonlinear relationship, and there was a threshold of relationship change between them, with the impact of urbanization on ESs showing evident spatial heterogeneity in terms of both the driving direction and intensity of change over time. (4) The change-over-time method identified 1992-1995 and 2008-2013 as key periods of change in the relationship between urbanization and ESs in the XJRB, and the method had the advantage of revealing the spatial heterogeneity of the effects of driving factors. These findings provide a reference for decision making related to urban planning.