The Analysis and Evaluation of Landuse Scenarios in the Liaohe River Delta Wetlands

The Liaohe River Delta wetlands (i.e. Shuangtai-hekou National Reserve) is the second largest reed marsh in the world and designated as a wetland of international importance for the endangered waterbirds. It is both a Chinese biosphere reserve of MAB and a reserve of “East Asia——Australia Water-bird Migration Route”. On the other hand, the Liaohe River Delta wetlands possesses huge economic potentials, which always collide with the conservation priorities in the same spatiotemporal context. In the past decades, the Liaohe River Delta wetlands has been increasingly suffered from the various human activities. Vast area of reed marsh and intertidal area were encroached and subjected to extensive agriculture and oil gas development, as well as aquaculture in and around the reserve, which has led the area highly fragmented and threaten the habitat availability for the endangered species. The conflicts between the conservation priorities vs. economic benefits are thereby confronted as the key issue for the regional sustainable development in the Liaohe Delta region. Our research aimed at exploring effective “spatial solution” or so-called “spatial bargaining” to mitigate the competing landuse by applying the GIS-based expect model (i.e., LEDESS) and scenarios approach. A set of useful decision support information has been generated and extracted from the scenarios study that can build upon the wise decision-making. Based on the previous research which has modeled the ecological consequences (i.e. habitat suitability and carrying capacity of the indicator species) by the LEDESS-model (i.e. Landscape Ecological Decision and Evaluation Support System) under the different land use scenarios in the Liaohe River Delta wetlands, this paper tried to integrate the economic components into the evaluating process so as to provide a spatially explicit overview for both ecological and economic aspects under the different scenarios. The PEE (Patch Ecological Economic) was established to reflect integrated effects of the ecological and economic aspects, and to spatially quantify the regional eco-economic effects of the scenarios with the assistance of GIS techniques. The modeling results indicate that scenario A (wetland mitigation) and scenario B (habitat management) can both enhance the ecological value and optimize the eco-economic structure remarkably. Though scenario C (agricultural development) can bring high economic benefit at no cost provided for the habitat compensation, its eco-economic effect is very limited compared with the existing situation due to the habitat loss. Further, the results show that the large area of reed marsh with little fragmentation perform highest potential eco-economic value among all the habitat types. Thus, it is assumed that developing reed marsh combined with effective habitat management to alleviate habitat fragmentation would be a kind of friendly landuse type in terms of regional biodiversity conservation in the Liaohe River Delta wetlands. Finally, the scenarios were discussed with some suggestions provided for regional sustainable development in Liaohe River Delta wetlands. The main conclusions were generalized following: (1)The Liaohe River Delta wetlands still possesses huge potential for the agricultural development. Under the proposed scale of agriculture development, the “scrolling mode” can largely alleviate the adverse effect on the habitat of indicator species (i.e. Red-crowned crane and Saunder's gull), the viability of the species will not be seriously threatened even without efforts of habitat mitigation (scenario C). (2)Despite of larger investment, the wetland mitigation (scenario A) is a kind of positive measure of ecological construction. The ecological manipulation of wetland mitigation can compensate the loss of wetland habitat completely and improve the habitat quality remarkably. This would facilitate the species to colonize the potential habitats in the future. Compared with the habitat mitigation, the habitat management (scenario B) is a more or less passive