Service Valuation of Grassland Ecosystem in Qinghai Province
摘要
In recent years, evaluation of services has been improved gradually and becomes a new field in ecology and ecological economics. Through this evaluation, we can clearly understand the real values of different ecosystems and bring the values into the national economic accounting and regional development decision-making. Referring to some concepts in economics, can be used to describe the values in some special ecosystem's structure; ecosystem service can be used to describe the values of some special ecosystem's function. The former involves the structure features, e.g. animals, plants, biomass, soil etc. The latter refers to the ecosystem's functional capacity for humankind, e.g. primary production, soil formation and conservation, water regulation etc. Because of the disfigurement, it is very difficult for traditional economic methodology to deal with the problems of ecological economics, especially the objective evaluation of ecological capital and services. However, emergy methodology provides the possibility to analyze the values of main driving forces, inherent process and functional relationship of the ecosystems.In this paper, based on the long term observation data in typical grassland of Qinghai Province and using emergy theory, we analyzed the main emergy flow and services, calculated the natural capital and emergy transition rate, evaluated the macro-economic values and replacement values of the grassland ecosystem. The results show that the grassland services is about 609.35em$/hm~2/a, among that water regulation value is 89.9 em$/hm~2/a, NPP and GPP values are 259.73 em$/hm~2/a, respectively. The natural capital is about 1 196.23em$/hm~2/a, among that, living biomass values 1 038.9 em$/hm~2, water ecological capital is 157.33 em$/hm~2/a. The total values of grassland services and natural capital of grassland ecosystems in Qinghai Province are 204×10~8em$/a and 1 196.23em$/hm~2 , respectively. The replacement value of grassland is 2 235 em$, and the to