When to Use What: A Comparison of Three Approaches to Quantify Relationships Among Ecosystem Services

Sustainable landscape management requires accurately identifying the trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services (ES). Three commonly utilized approaches to quantify ES trade-off/synergy relationships include the space-for-time approach, landscape background-adjusted space-for-time approach, and temporal trend approach. However, the similarities and differences among these three approaches in identifying ES relationships in the same area remain unclear. Thus, we conducted a case study in the rapidly urbanizing Yangtze River Delta region, comparing the three approaches based on annual data spanning from 2001 to 2020 for 12 types of ES. We found that: (1) the ES trade-off/synergy relationships detected by the three approaches exhibit significant divergence, with only 1.45% consistency among the 66 pairs of ES relationships. (2) All three approaches can overlook ES trade-offs, miss ES synergies, and erroneously detect interactions where none exist. (3) The mechanisms contributing to the misidentification of ES relationships by the three approaches include: neglecting the underlying assumptions of different approaches, insufficient time interval length, short time series of ES data, data aggregation effects, non-linear changes in ESs, time lag effects of ES relationships, among others. Our results indicate that each of the three approaches has its own advantages and disadvantages in identifying ES relationships. Prior to selecting an approach for identifying relationships between ESs in a specific study area, careful consideration of the availability of time series data, the characteristics of the chosen ES type, and thorough examination of the underlying assumptions and uncertainties of each approach are imperative.