Metacoupling supply and demand for soil conservation service

To date most soil conservation service studies heavily focus on measuring soil conservation service supply from the natural system without considering corresponding beneficiaries (i.e. demand), and feedback from the human system. In this paper, we presented an updated soil conservation service assessment framework as a two-way analysis of supply and demand, identifying the impacts of soil conservation on human-wellbeing and the feedback of human activities on soil conservation supply observed at different scales, from local (intracoupling) to regional (telecoupling). Soil conservation services supply can be calculated as the maximum allowable erosion rate minus the current soil erosion rate while soil conservation demand needs consider targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals. Because of the disturbance effect transmutation, ecosystem management may trigger possible unprecedented negative effects on the target processes and/or non-target processes. Tradeoff analysis between soil conservation services and other ecosystems services at multiple scales are therefore necessary for regional sustainable development.