Water, Vol. 8, Pages 301: Ecosystem Services Valuation of Lakeside Wetland Park beside Chaohu Lake in China

Wetland ecosystems are one of the three great ecosystems on Earth. With a deepening of research on wetland ecosystems, researchers have paid more and more attention to wetland ecosystem services such as flood mitigation, climate control, pollution prevention, soil-erosion prevention, biodiversity maintenance, and bio-productivity protection. This study focuses on a lakeside wetland ecosystem in Hefei, a city in central China, and estimates the value of ecosystem services such as material production, air purification, water conservation, biodiversity, recreation, species conservation, education and scientific research. We adopted the market value method, carbon tax method, afforestation cost method, shadow engineering method and contingent value method (CVM) using questionnaire survey data during the study period. The results show that the total value of the ecosystem services of Lakeside Wetland Park was 144 million CNY in 2015. Among these services, the value of society service is the maximum at 91.73 million CNY, followed by ecological service and material production service (42.23 million CNY and 10.43 billion CNY in 2015 respectively). When considering wetland ecosystems for economic development, other services must be considered in addition to material production to obtain a longer-term economic value. This research reveals that there is scope for more comprehensive and integrated model development, including multiple wetland ecosystem services and appropriate handling of wetland ecosystem management impacts.

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