Trade-offs between cropland quality and ecosystem services of marginal compensated cropland – A case study in Wuhan, China

Abstract Urban expansion is taking in cropland at unprecedented rates worldwide, especially in China. In order to guarantee national food security, China has been implementing the strictest cropland protection policies in the world. The purpose of cropland protection policies in China is to keep the quantity and quality of cropland from declining. The loss of cropland resulted from urbanization is required to be compensated by occupying natural or semi natural land, which leads to a sharp degradation of the terrestrial ecosystem services. As a result, it is crucial to explore the relationship between cropland quality and ecosystem services with different amounts of compensated cropland required by cropland protection policies. In this paper, we evaluated the impacts of the combination of urban expansion and cropland protection policies on trade-offs between cropland quality and ecosystem services in Wuhan, China. Specifically, we simulated land use changes with different amounts of cropland compensation in order to reveal the relationship between cropland quality and ecosystem services of marginal compensated cropland. Results show that, with more cropland are compensated, the quality of marginal compensated cropland decreases while the marginal loss of ecosystem services increases. Our study indicates that, an increasing amount of compensated cropland would result in relative lower quality of compensated cropland with relatively higher ecological cost.