Forest ecosystem services and their values in Beijing

As the most important ecosystem in Beijing, the forest supports a lot of ecosystem services to local and around communities, which plays a key role in the maintenance of urban ecological security. However, the valuation on the forest ecosystem services based on regional scale could not provide precise and reasonable values for forestry sector management. In this study, we estimated the magnitudes and economic values of the forest ecosystem services in Beijing at sublot level. The economic value of forest ecosystem services in Beijing was estimated to be 19 339.71×106 yuan (RMB) in 2004. Among all the ecosystem services indicators we estimated in this study, only fruit, timber and part of the recreation (which only include the tourism income from the forest parks and scenic areas, but not include that from other forest types) were measured in the social economic system. As estimated in this study, more than 82.19% of the economic value of forest ecosystem services could not be measured in the socio-economic statistical system. The importance of forest ecosystem services in Beijing to human welfare was underestimated by the socio-economic system. Therefore, the policies about the eco-compensation of forest ecosystem services should be established to maintain the sustainable supply of the forest ecosystem services in Beijing.