Modeling changes in land use patterns and ecosystem services to explore a potential solution for meeting the management needs of a heritage site at the landscape level

Integrating a qualification of ecosystem services into a decision-making for conservation of a world heritage site at the landscape level remains a new challenge so far, especially for China that has abundant and valuable heritage sites with the development boom in China's economy and society. In this paper, we took the Wuyishan Scenery District (WSD), a core part of the cultural and nature world heritage site Mount Wui, as our case study site to explore how a modeling of land use changes and spatial qualification of ecosystem services may facilitate local authorities' decision-making. Here, a binary logistic regression was performed to quantify the impacts of selected driving factors on the distribution of land uses. Then, we adopted a CLUE-S model to spatially analyze changes in the landscape pattern and ecosystem services by simulating the following three scenarios: a historical trend, non-selective management of tea plantations, and selective management of tea plantations. The seven selected driving factors (elevation, aspect, slope, distance to the nearest road, distance to the closest river, distance to the closest settlement, and distance to the closest parking lot) were found to be associated with high prediction accuracy for all types of land use (ROC ≥ 0.857) other than non-matrix forests (ROC = 0.735) and tea plantations (ROC = 0.638). The results demonstrated that the third scenario entailing selective management of tea plantations offers a potential solution that can effectively mitigate expansion of tea plantations, while addressing serious issues relating to managerial needs at the landscape level. Implementing this measure would facilitate the protection of high quality tea plantations that form a crucial part of the world cultural and natural heritage site of Mount Wuyi. It can further help to restore Pinus massoniana matrix forests in WSD, and potentially increase the value of ecosystem services. Moreover, it could establish base-line conditions for future management and policy making in this site.