Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

Uncovering the relationships between ecosystem services and social-

ecological drivers at different spatial scales in the Beijing-Tianjin-
Hebei region
Jiashu Shen a, b, Shuangcheng Li a, b, *, Laibao Liu a, b, Ze Liang a, b, Yueyao Wang a, b,
Huan Wang a, b, Shuyao Wu c
a
College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
b
Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
c
Environmental Research Center, Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Ecosystem service is widely acknowledged as a mainstream and valuable concept for the sustainability-
Received 28 July 2020 oriented decision-makings on meeting the fundamental needs for improving human well-being and
Received in revised form addressing the critical challenges such as food scarcity, land degradation, climate warming, biodiversity
15 October 2020
loss, flood risk and population pressure. Different ecosystem services arise through combinations of
Accepted 14 November 2020
Available online 19 November 2020
social-ecological drivers and interact with each other across scales. Essential to design effective policy
interventions toward achieving sustainability is clarifying the relationships among ecosystem services
Handling editor: Zhifu Mi and the underlying drivers at different scales. Therefore, this study analysed the spatial patterns and
relationships of six ecosystem service supplies and examined their responses to ten social-ecological
Keywords: drivers at three spatial scales in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in 2015. Our results revealed differ-
Ecosystem services ences in ecosystem service spatial pattern robustness across scales. The trade-offs and synergies between
Trade-offs ecosystem services changed less in direction and more in strength at the three scales. The relationships
Synergies between the provisioning service and the other ecosystem services were mostly antagonistic, and those
Bundles
between the regulating services and cultural service were predominately synergistic. Different types of
Social-ecological drivers
ecosystem service bundles comprising different abundances of services were detected, and reconfigu-
Spatial scales
ration of ecosystem service bundles occurred as the scale changed. The directions of social-ecological
drivers’ impacts varied across ecosystem services, and the magnitudes of social-ecological drivers’ im-
pacts on the services varied at different scales. Across the three spatial scales, the most influential driver
of ecosystem services was the normalized difference vegetation index, to which different ecosystem
services responded diversely and non-linearly. Our results advocated the multiscale assessment of
ecosystem services and social-ecological drivers and emphasized the necessity of embracing scale de-
pendency in the hierarchical governance of ecosystem services.
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction characteristics, functions, or processes that directly or indirectly

Ecosystem services (ESs) are broadly defined as the ecological
* Corresponding author. Shuangcheng Li Institute: College of Urban and Envi-
ronmental Sciences, Peking UniversityAddress: Dian Jiao Building, Peking Univer-
sity, No. 5 Yiheyuan Road Haidian District, Beijing, China.
E-mail addresses: jiashu_shen@pku.edu.cn (J. Shen), scli@urban.pku.edu.cn
(S. Li), liulb15@pku.edu.cn (L. Liu), liangze@pku.edu.cn (Z. Liang), wyywyy16@
pku.edu.cn (Y. Wang), 1906593362@pku.edu.cn (H. Wang), shuyao.wu@
dukekunshan.edu.cn (S. Wu).
contribute to sustainable human well-being (Costanza, 2020; Fu
et al., 2013; Guerry et al., 2015) and can be typically categorized
into provisioning, regulating, and cultural services (Bennett et al.,
2009; Howe et al., 2014; Pereira, 2020; Spake et al., 2017;
Turkelboom et al., 2018). By bridging social and ecological dy-
namics, the interdisciplinary concept of ESs has gained greater
importance and growing attention in scientific and policy arenas
(Birkhofer et al., 2015; Fisher et al., 2009; Gao et al., 2017; Keeler
et al., 2019; Vialatte et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2021). The past twenty
years have witnessed increasing efforts to facilitate the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125193
0959-6526/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
incorporation of ES provision into environmental policies and
ecological management addressing sustainability challenges
(Costanza et al., 2017; Mouchet et al., 2014; Roces-Díaz et al., 2018).
The major constraints hindering this progress are unravelling how
multiple ESs are related to each other and disentangling how
different social-ecological drivers influence ESs (Andersson et al.,
2015; Dade et al., 2018; Falk et al., 2018; Ndong et al., 2020).
Adequate understandings of these relationships between ESs and
social-ecological drivers are the precondition and foundation of
efficiently managing ESs and formulating effective policies for
improving human well-being (Liu et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2020b).
Relationships between different categories of ESs can occur as
bundles, trade-offs and synergies (Agudelo et al., 2020; Cord et al.,
2017). When sets of ESs appear together repeatedly in space, they
are referred to as ES bundles (ESBs) (Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010).
Meanwhile, the positive covariations or opposing trends in the
supplies of multiple ESs are known as synergies and trade-offs
(Feng et al., 2020; Liang et al., 2021; Sannigrahi et al., 2020;
Torralba et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2020b; Zhang et al., 2020b; Zhong
et al., 2020). Overall, there are not only characteristic ESBs
composed of ESs with different contributions but also diverse
trade-offs and synergies between individual ESs. Some ESBs tend to
be fairly specialized in one or a few services, such as provisioning
services, whereas other bundles of ESs are linked with a high
prevalence of regulating and cultural services (Dittrich et al., 2017;
Dou et al., 2020; Mouchet et al., 2017; Saidi and Spray, 2018;
Schirpke et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2018). Corre-
spondingly, on the one hand, increases in provisioning services are
often accompanied by decreases in other ESs, and on the other
hand, synergies are primarily observed between regulating and
cultural services (Chen et al., 2019; Howe et al., 2014; Lee and
Lautenbach, 2016; Smith et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2019).
ESs and the relationships between them ultimately depend on
the impacts of social-ecological drivers such as biodiversity, geo-
diversity, climate change, social institutions and economic dy-
namics (Alahuhta et al., 2018; Bennett et al., 2015; Congreve and
Cross, 2019; Dai et al., 2020; Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson,
2016; Sannigrahi et al., 2020; Wang and Dai, 2020; Wilkerson
et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2020b). Different social-ecological drivers
can affect ESs in different ways (Dade et al., 2018; Felipe-Lucia et al.,
2018; Zhang et al., 2018). Multiple drivers may have an influence on
a single service, with only trivial effects on other ESs, or they may
have significant effects on several services at once (Bennett et al.,
2009). Whether these drivers’ impacts are positive or negative is
service-dependent, and the magnitudes of these impacts are
location-specific (Cord et al., 2017; Gao et al., 2017; Jiang et al.,
2019; Liang et al., 2021; Mao et al., 2019; Qi et al., 2020; Runting
et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2020a). Different ESs can co-vary linearly or
non-linearly along the gradients of individual drivers and have
potential thresholds or tipping points beyond which service de-
livery may be compromised (Alahuhta et al., 2018; Emmett et al.,
2016; Feng et al., 2020; Maskell et al., 2013; Qiu et al., 2019;
Wang et al., 2019a; Xu et al., 2020a; Zhang et al., 2020b). The spatial
congruency or discrepancy of ESs likely arises from the similarities
and differences in the relevant drivers underlying these services
(Spake et al., 2017).
The complexity and uncertainty behind the abovementioned
findings across the literature are mainly reflected in the scale de-
pendency and context dependency of ESs and social-ecological
drivers. Most research exploring ESs and their drivers focus on a
specific scale, such as regular grids and administrative districts
(Mehring et al., 2018). However, as diverse drivers may act differ-
ently in their relationships with ESs at various spatial scales, the
provision, distributions, and relationships of ESs can also differ
across scales (Bai et al., 2020; Emmett et al., 2016; Felipe-Lucia
2
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
^t-Regamey et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2017; Qiao et al.,
et al., 2014; Gre
2019; Qiu et al., 2018; Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson, 2016;
Roces-Díaz et al., 2018; Steur et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2017). Among
these few existing studies investigating the scale-dependent char-
acteristics of ESs and social-ecological drivers, the multiscale as-
sessments in the majority of the studies have generally been
confined to the spatial mappings of ESs or the trade-offs and syn-
ergies among ESs. There is very limited knowledge on how different
ESBs and social-ecological drivers of ESs change across different
spatial scales (Bai et al., 2020; Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson,
2016; Steur et al., 2020). Moreover, whether the linear or non-
linear responses of ESs to the social-ecological drivers change
with spatial scales has seldom been examined and still remain
poorly understood (Emmett et al., 2016). Irrespective of scale de-
pendency, the impacts of social-ecological drivers on ESs are often
inconsistent among different studies, and the particular relation-
ships between ESs usually vary in different regions (Liu et al., 2019;
Pereira, 2020; Schirpke et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2020; Turkelboom
et al., 2018; Wang and Dai, 2020; Xu et al., 2020b; Zhang et al.,
2020b; Zheng et al., 2019). Therefore, conducting multiscale, ho-
listic and regional studies to quantitatively understand the re-
lationships among ESs and social-ecological drivers is urgently
needed.
Since decisions regarding ESs are commonly made at different
scales, the hierarchical governance of ESs appears to be one of the
cornerstones of ES governance (Primmer et al., 2015). With the aim
of harmonizing economic development with nature and sustaining
ES supplies, the Chinese government has released a wide range of
management policies with hierarchical structures in the Beijing-
Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region, which has experienced rapid eco-
nomic growth and faces serious ecological degradation due to ur-
banization (Peng et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2019a; Xie et al., 2017;
Yang et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019). When designing policy in-
struments for the hierarchical governance of ESs in this region,
adopting a multiscale approach to provide regional knowledge of
the dynamic changes in ES distributions, relationships and drivers
across spatial scales may enable the manipulation of social-
ecological drivers to enhance deliveries of ESs, improve the re-
lationships between ESs, and avoid unexpected repercussions (Bai
et al., 2020; Bennett et al., 2009; Roces-Díaz et al., 2018; Saidi
and Spray, 2018).
Hence, this study attempted to comprehensively assess multiple
ESs and different social-ecological drivers at three spatial scales
(1 km2, 100 km2 and county scales) in the BTH region. We first
quantified and mapped six ESs at different spatial scales in 2015.
Subsequently, we analysed the trade-offs, synergies and bundles of
these ESs across the three spatial scales. Finally, we explored the
impacts of ten social-ecological drivers on the ESs and revealed the
responses of these ESs to the most influential driver at all three
spatial scales. In addition, suggestions for the hierarchical gover-
nance of ESs in the BTH region are proposed on the basis of our
findings.
2. Material and methods
2.1. Study area
Situated in the North China Plain (Fig. 1), the BTH region is the
second largest traditional agricultural area and one of the most
developed and populous urban agglomerations in China (Gao et al.,
2014; Peng et al., 2016). It has a total surface area of 216,500 km2,
representing 2.2% of the total land area of China (Peng et al., 2017).
The BTH region comprises two municipalities (i.e., Beijing and
Tianjin) and eleven prefecture-level cities in Hebei Province. The
county is usually the basic scale for official statistics and political
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
Fig. 1. Geographical location of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
decisions in China, and there are 202 counties with an average area
of 1071 km2 in the BTH region (Yang et al., 2019). The climate of the
BTH region is characterized as a temperate monsoon climate with
an annual mean temperature of 3  Ce15  C and annual mean
precipitation of 304e750 mm (Wang et al., 2019a). The spatial
distributions of precipitation and temperature exhibit heteroge-
neity in the region. Precipitation shows a downward trend from
east to west, and temperature exhibits an ascending trend from
north to south (Peng et al., 2017). Cultivated and urban lands are the
dominant land use types of the alluvial coastal plain in the south-
east, while the Yan and Taihang Mountains in the northwest are, to
a large extent, dominated by forests and grasslands (Yang et al.,
2019).
2.2. Quantifying ecosystem services at multiple spatial scales
Following previous studies (Bai et al., 2020; Cord et al., 2017;
Dou et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2019), three criteria
were used to determine the ES indicators for the BTH region: (1) the
specificity of the ES indicators in relation to the geographic char-
acteristics of the BTH region; (2) the representativeness of different
ES categories and diversified ESs in the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment and Common International Classification of Ecosystem
Services classification frameworks; and (3) the data available to
quantify the ES indicators. On the basis of these criteria, six ES in-
dicators were chosen and assessed in this study, including one
provisioning service (food production), four regulating services
(soil conservation, carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection
and flood mitigation) and one cultural service (recreation service).
The ESs were first quantified at a 1 km2 scale in 2015, and then the
mean values of ES indicators at the 100 km2 and county scales were
calculated (Gre ^t-Regamey et al., 2014; Qiao et al., 2019; Qiu et al.,
2018; Roces-Díaz et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2017). Table A1 provides
an overview of the ESs included in this study. Detailed data sources
and methods on the modelling approaches for these ES supplies
can be found in Shen et al. (2020). The three scales chosen
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Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
represented different levels of administrative governance of natural
capital and ESs in the BTH region. The 1 km2 scale was chosen to
represent the site scale, where fine and individual management of
ecosystems occurred. The 100 km2 scale was chosen to approxi-
mately represent the township scale involving local landscape
management. The county scale was chosen because it is usually the
basic scale for making spatial planning and management decisions
for landscapes.
2.3. Analysing the relationships between ecosystem services at
multiple spatial scales
Considering that the six ES indicators had different units, we
made the range and the variability of values comparable across ES
indicators by using 90% winsorization and minimum-maximum
normalization at each scale (Stürck and Verburg, 2017). Correla-
tion analysis is the most popular quantitative method used to
evaluate the direction and strength of trade-offs and synergies
between ESs (Agudelo et al., 2020; Cord et al., 2017; Dade et al.,
2018). To assess changes in the antagonistic and synergetic re-
lationships between the six services across scales, Spearman cor-
relations (R packages vegan and corrplot, R v3.5 statistical
software) that were sufficiently robust to tackle differences in data
distributions of ES indicators (García et al., 2020) were quantified
between each pair of ESs at the three different scales of analysis.
Through the integration of the capacities of dimensionality reduc-
tion and cluster analysis, self-organizing maps are not only
conductive to visualizing the spatial clustering of grid cells based on
the similarity of their provision of ESs but also applicable at
different spatial scales such that the variations in the characteristics
of bundled ESs across scales can be compared (Dittrich et al., 2017).
The self-organizing maps derived from Kohonen’s algorithms (R
package kohonen, Wehrens and Kruisselbrink, 2018) were used to
capture different bundles of ESs at the three scales. At each scale of
analysis, the sensitivity of the self-organizing maps’ results was
explored by building 2e30 clusters, and the lowest Davies-Bouldin
index calculated by the clusterSim R package was obtained for the
optimal number of ESBs (Davies and Bouldin, 1979). The average
provision of ESs in different ESBs was shown by flower plots (R
package ggplot2).
2.4. Identifying the social-ecological drivers of ecosystem services at
multiple spatial scales
The ten social-ecological drivers of different ESs in the BTH re-
gion were selected as a compromise between relevance and data
availability at the scale required. These potential drivers included
factors that were used in the quantification of ESs to account for
their impacts on different ESs and other independent variables that
were identified to be associated with the assessed ESs based on the
literature (Liu et al., 2018; Mouchet et al., 2017; Sun et al., 2020;
Wang and Dai, 2020; Xu et al., 2020a, 2021; Yang et al., 2019; Zhang
et al., 2018, 2020a; Zhao et al., 2018; Zhong et al., 2020). Table A.2
provides an overview of the ten drivers of ESs. Data preparation for
potential social-ecological drivers is described in the supplemen-
tary material. The resolutions of different data of potential social-
ecological drivers were first unified to 1 km2 for consistency. The
average values of these drivers at the 100 km2 and county scales
were then calculated. At different spatial scales, each social-
ecological driver was also transformed to a common, unitless
[0e1] interval by using 90% winsorization and minimum-
maximum normalization (Castro et al., 2014).
By combining multiple regressions and ordination, canonical
analysis is well suited to quantitatively explore the causal re-
lationships between multiple ESs and potential drivers (Mouchet
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
et al., 2014). At different spatial scales, the redundancy analysis in
the vegan R package was applied to examine the relationships
between ESs and social-ecological drivers, as well as to determine
how much variation in different ES supplies could be explained by
these drivers (Feng et al., 2020; Maskell et al., 2013). At each spatial
scale, permutation tests (999 permutations) were performed to test
the significance of the relationships between ESs and drivers (Sun
et al., 2020; Zoderer et al., 2019). Multicollinearity among social-
ecological drivers was checked by using variance inflation factors.
All the variance inflation factor values of the drivers included in the
analysis were smaller than ten at the three spatial scales (Dou et al.,
2020; Hicks and Cinner, 2014; Zuur et al., 2010).
On the basis of the results from redundancy analysis, the po-
tential responses of the six ESs to the most influential driver that
had the highest explanatory power for these ESs at different scales
were visualized by means of the generalized additive models in the
mgcv R package (Emmett et al., 2016; Wood, 2017). Because they
can accommodate highly non-linear relationships, generalized
additive models are useful for characterizing the responses of ESs to
a driver without specifying the a priori shapes of the curves
(Fournier et al., 2015). At each spatial scale, different generalized
additive models were developed by using the identity link function
and assuming a Gaussian family (Bardsen et al., 2018; Brun et al.,
2019; Gerling et al., 2019). Thin plate regression splines with
appealing properties were used to represent smooth terms in all
the univariate models (Wood, 2017; Wu et al., 2019). The basis
dimension of each smooth term was restricted below mgcv defaults
to avoid over- (or under-) parameterization (Alahuhta et al., 2018;
Laiolo et al., 2018; Peters et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2018; Ziter et al.,
2019).
3. Results
3.1. Spatial patterns of ecosystem services at different spatial scales
The provision of the six ESs varied substantially across the BTH
region and showed differences in their spatial patterns at the three
scales in 2015 (Fig. 2). The fine-scale variances in the delivery of
individual ESs tended to be lost and the spatial distribution tended
to be more homogeneous and clustered as the spatial scale
increased. Generally, a high supply of the provisioning service was
mostly distributed in the southeast of the BTH region, whereas a
high supply of the other services was mainly located in the
northwestern mountains.
Food production showed broadly similar spatial patterns across
scales, with most of the high-value areas concentrated on the
southeastern plains and a few high-value areas situated in the
northwest that disappeared at the coarser county scale. The spatial
distribution of soil conservation also exhibited similarities at the
three scales of analysis. A high supply of soil conservation was
located in the mountainous areas with diverse coverages of vege-
tation, and low soil conservation was observed in the flat areas in
the southeast at different scales. As the scale became coarser, the
spatial clustering of high carbon sequestration appeared to be more
obvious in the northern BTH region, while the areas providing low
carbon sequestration became smaller. The supply of biodiversity
protection displayed distinct spatial patterns from the 1 km2 scale
to the county scale. Compared with those at the other two scales,
the low-supply areas of biodiversity protection were more widely
spread and extensive in the southeastern plains at the 100 km2
scale. The fine-scale spatial pattern of areas providing high biodi-
versity protection was generalized at coarser scales, and most of
these areas clumped in the northwestern BTH region. Flood miti-
gation was provided in large amounts across the whole region at
the three different scales. Areas showing a high supply of flood
4
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
mitigation towards the northwestern mountains and parts of the
southern plains spatially aggregated as the scale changed. The
spatial pattern of the recreation service varied distinctly at different
scales. When the scale increased from 1 km2 to the county scale, the
high-delivery areas of the recreation service distributed in the
northwestern region gradually shrunk, yet the low-delivery areas
of this service were scattered in the southeastern plains and
northern part of the BTH region at the county scale.
3.2. Trade-offs, synergies and bundles of ecosystem services at
different spatial scales
The antagonistic and synergistic relationships between the
six ESs at the three scales in the BTH region in 2015 were detected
by calculating Spearman correlation coefficients (Fig. 3). Most pairs
of ES supplies were significantly correlated at all spatial scales,
except for the non-significant correlation between the recreation
service and flood mitigation at the county scale. The trade-offs and
synergies between ESs changed less in direction and more in
strength across the three spatial scales. There was a preponderance
of synergies over trade-offs between ESs. Positive and persistent
correlations mainly arose between regulating services and between
regulating services and the cultural service. Negative correlations
were all observed between the provisioning service and the other
services at the three scales. Only the relationships between food
production and carbon sequestration shifted between synergy and
trade-off relationships as the scale changed. With the scale rising
from 1 km2 to the county scale, the strengths of trade-offs and
synergies between most ESs increased first and then decreased.
Despite the relationships between the recreation service and three
regulating services, the stronger antagonistic effects and synergetic
impacts of different ESs on each other were mostly found at the
100 km2 scale. The strengths of synergies between the recreation
service and soil conservation and between the recreation service
and biodiversity protection increased consistently with scale, while
the strength of the correlations between the recreation service and
flood mitigation continued to decline as the scale increased.
Applying the self-organizing mapping algorithm and estimating
the Davies-Bouldin index revealed that different ESBs were distinct
in the types and abundance of provisioning, regulating, and cultural
services at the three spatial scales in the BTH region in 2015 (Fig. 4
and A1-A.3). Corresponding to the deliveries of multiple ESs (Fig. 2),
a comparison of ESBs across scales revealed the disappearance of
fine-grained spatial patterns of several ESBs and that the bundled
ESs were prone to spatial aggregation when the scale was coarser.
At the 1 km2 scale, ESB1 and ESB2 presented diverse types of
regulating and cultural services with high supply levels, situated in
the northwestern region. Three of the ESBs (ESB3, ESB4, and ESB5)
were primarily distributed in the southeastern plains. These bundle
types were hotspots of food production and displayed moderate
deliveries of the regulating services, excluding soil conservation.
The remaining two bundles were characterized by restricted sets of
services. ESB6 was provided by water bodies and other surrounding
ecosystems spread over the BTH region and mainly included the
recreation service accompanied by a high supply of food produc-
tion, whereas ESB7 was representative of a cold spot of most ESs
and delivered in and near urban areas. As the scale changed from
1 km2 to 100 km2, ESBs varied markedly in number, type and spatial
distribution. Seven ESBs geographically aggregated into two ESBs as
the scale increased. ESBi predominantly clustered in the north-
western mountains and showed the highest abundances of regu-
lating services and the cultural service, which were congruent with
those observed for ESB2 at the 1 km2 scale. Mainly located in the
southeastern plains, ESBii had a higher supply of food production
but lower values of other services when compared with those of
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
Fig. 2. Spatial patterns of ecosystem services in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at the three scales of analysis (1 km2, 100 km2 and county).
ESBi. With an increase to the county scale, different ESBs were
generally consistent, bearing close resemblances to the bundles of
services at the 100 km2 scale. The provision of most ESs in ESBa and
ESBb changed little, although the two bundle types became more
spatially clumped at the county scale.
3.3. Relationships between ecosystem services and social-ecological
drivers at different spatial scales
The redundancy analysis revealed statistically significant re-
lationships between ES supplies and social-ecological drivers at the
three spatial scales in the BTH region in 2015 (p < 0.001, 999 per-
mutations). The ten social-ecological drivers explained 40.5%, 66.3%
5
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
and 69.2% of the ES distributions at the 1 km2, 100 km2 and county
scales, respectively (adjusted R2, Table 1). The percentage of ES
variance explained by each individual driver also varied with scale
(Table 1). The first two axes of the redundancy analysis at each scale
are shown by biplots (Fig. 5). Across the three scales of analysis, the
majority of the types of relationships between ESs and their drivers
remained unchanged, with a few exceptions. The positive re-
lationships between the normalized difference vegetation index
and the six ESs persisted as the scale changed. The distance to ur-
ban areas and sand fraction of the topsoil had negative correlations
with food production and positive correlations with the other ESs
at all spatial scales. Population density was negatively related to the
regulating services and cultural service at different scales, but its
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
Fig. 3. Trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at the three scales of analysis (1 km2, 100 km2 and county). The green and red circles
above the diagonal indicate positive and negative correlations between ecosystem services, respectively. The asterisks in the circles show the significance degree (*** for p < 0.001,
** for p < 0.01, * for p < 0.05). The numbers below the diagonal indicate the Spearman’s correlation coefficients, with their colours matching those of the corresponding circles.
Darker colours demonstrate stronger correlations. FP: food production; SC: soil conservation; CS: carbon sequestration; BP: biodiversity protection; FM: flood mitigation; RS:
recreation service. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
relationships with food production were positive at the two finer
spatial scales and changed to negative at the county scale. Elevation
correlated negatively with carbon sequestration at finer scales and
positively at the county scale. The correlations between elevation
and the other services persisted at different scales. By contrast, as
the spatial scale increased, the positive relationships between
temperature and carbon sequestration became negative, while the
types of relationships between temperature and the other ESs were
constant. The magnitudes of the relationships between different
ESs and drivers changed with scale. Food production was more
tightly related to temperature, especially at the 100 km2 scale. The
correlation between carbon sequestration and the normalized dif-
ference vegetation index was also closer at the 100 km2 scale.
Distance to urban areas, sand fraction of the topsoil and elevation
were strongly correlated with soil conservation, biodiversity pro-
tection, flood mitigation and the recreation service, and the
strengths of these relationships changed to some extent across
scales. Precipitation and the rest of the soil metrics also had
different impacts on the deliveries of ESs at different scales, but the
explanatory power of these drivers for ESs was limited.
Among the social-ecological drivers, the normalized difference
vegetation index appeared to be the most influential driver of ESs
across all spatial scales (Table 1). As visualized by the generalized
additive models, ESs responded uniquely to the normalized dif-
ference vegetation index at different scales (Fig. 6, Table A.3). The
rhythmicity and magnitudes of the non-linear trajectories of each
ES along the normalized difference vegetation index gradient var-
ied with scale. Although the general relationships between the ESs
and normalized difference vegetation index were positive for the
whole BTH region at all spatial scales (Fig. 5), there were potential
thresholds in the response curves, beyond which the provision of
ESs declined as the normalized difference vegetation index
increased.
When the scale changed from 1 km2 to the county scale, the
unimodal response curves of food production to the normalized
difference vegetation index were more discernible. After a certain
level of growth, food production decreased at high levels of the
normalized difference vegetation index. The supply of the recrea-
tion service tended to follow concave-upward trajectories along the
normalized difference vegetation index gradient at the two finer
scales. At the county scale, the response curves of the recreation
service to the normalized difference vegetation index became more
non-linear, exhibiting increasing trends at the low and high ends of
6
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
the normalized difference vegetation index gradient and
decreasing trends in the middle of the gradient. The positive and
non-linear relationships between the regulating services and
normalized difference vegetation index were relatively stable
across all spatial scales. Different regulating services primarily
exhibited increasing patterns along the normalized difference
vegetation index gradient.
4. Discussion
Our study offered a multiscale and comprehensive approach to
untangle the relationships among ESs and social-ecological drivers
at different spatial scales. Our findings contributed to enriching the
current knowledge on the scale-dependent changes of the ESs
patterns, trade-offs and synergies, shedding new light on the in-
fluence of spatial scales on ESBs, improving the understandings of
how different social-ecological drivers shaped ESs across scales,
and providing insights on integrating the scale dependency of ESs
into the hierarchical governance of ESs to promote sustainability.
4.1. Multiscale characteristics of the spatial patterns and
relationships of ecosystem services
ES supplies and the relationships between them were influ-
enced by the spatial heterogeneity of social-ecological drivers and
underpinned by cascades of scale-dependent processes, therefore
showing complex dynamics that operated across spatial scales
(Cord et al., 2017; Dou et al., 2020; Hein et al., 2006; Mao et al.,
2019; Pan et al., 2020; Su et al., 2020). There were typological dif-
ferences in the robustness and persistence of spatial patterns of ESs
across different scales in the BTH region (Fig. 2). Although the de-
liveries of some ESs changed evenly and were relatively consistent
at the three scales, the spatial variations in other services, such as
biodiversity protection and the recreation service, exhibited
evident scale differences. The unpredictable and variable patterns
of the two services at different scales might result from their
dependence on accessibility to particular landscape elements that
underwent changes in characteristics and presence as the scale
varied (Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson, 2016). This underlined the
necessity to select appropriate scales for depicting the spatial pat-
terns of these types of services so that the precision required for
spatial mappings could be satisfied and needed information on the
ESs could be obtained when incorporating the ES assessments into
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193

Fig. 4. The spatial patterns of ecosystem service bundles (ESBs) in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at the three scales of analysis (1 km2, 100 km2 and county).

7
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193

Table 1
Redundancy analysis to determine the percentage of variance explained by social-ecological drivers in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at the three scales of analysis (1 km2,
100 km2 and county).

1 km2 scale 100 km2 scale County scale

P-
Social-ecological driver Percentage of variance explained Percentage of variance F- Percentage of variance F-
F-value value
(%) explained (%) value explained (%) value

All constrained 40.5 14571.0 66.3 425.4 69.2 45.4 <0.001

Normalized difference vegetation 21.7 59391.0 34.3 1125.6 27.7 76.8 <0.001
index
Elevation 13.1 32182.0 23.8 672.0 23.7 62.4 <0.001
Temperature 8.7 20479.0 17.4 454.3 18.2 45.1 <0.001
Precipitation 1.0 2150.8 2.2 50.4 5.0 11.3 <0.001
Topsoil sand fraction 2.4 5379.0 10.8 261.8 14.8 35.3 <0.001
Topsoil organic carbon 0.9 2011.7 2.9 64.8 5.3 12.1 <0.001
Topsoil silt fraction 0.9 2011.0 4.8 109.3 8.1 18.4 <0.001
Topsoil clay fraction 0.5 1044.6 1.6 35.4 2.7 6.5 <0.001
Population density 12.3 30084.0 26.4 772.3 16.8 41.1 <0.001
Distance to urban areas 12.0 29151.0 24.7 707.5 27.7 76.9 <0.001

Fig. 5. Redundancy analysis of ecosystem services (green) and social-ecological drivers (red) in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at the three scales of analysis (1 km2, 100 km2 and
county). The angles between arrows represent the strengths of the correlations between ecosystem services and social-ecological drivers. RDA: redundancy analysis; FP: food
production; SC: soil conservation; CS: carbon sequestration; BP: biodiversity protection; FM: flood mitigation; RS: recreation service; NDVI: normalized difference vegetation index;
DEM: elevation; Tem: temperature; Pre: precipitation; Tsand: topsoil sand fraction; Toc: topsoil organic carbon; Tsilt: topsoil silt fraction; Tclay: topsoil clay fraction; Pop: pop-
ulation density; Dtu: distance to urban areas. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

Fig. 6. Response curves showing the relationships between ecosystem services (ESs) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at
the three scales of analysis (1 km2, 100 km2 and county). FP: food production; SC: soil conservation; CS: carbon sequestration; BP: biodiversity protection; FM: flood mitigation; RS:
recreation service.

management decisions or planning (Bai et al., 2020; Felipe-Lucia
et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2017). In this regard, multiscale analysis of
spatial patterns of ESs offers a promising opportunity to combine
the advantages of both fine-scale and coarse-scale analyses and
provide a comprehensive panorama of and elaborate information
on the ES supplies (Cui et al., 2019; Fernandez-Campo et al., 2017;
Larondelle and Lauf, 2016). On the one hand, fine-scale mappings
were able to present local heterogeneity in the six ESs and thus
provided a clear picture for managing different ESs spatially and
precisely. The detailed variances of the ES deliveries across
8
locations shared similarities with the results from former studies in
the BTH region (Peng et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2019a; Xie et al.,
2017). On the other hand, despite the homogenization of the ES
patterns caused by the averaging effects when changing to coarser
scales (Roces-Díaz et al., 2018), coarse-scale assessments had the
advantage of identifying and emphasizing the potential hotspots
with spatial clumping in certain areas and that provided ESs at high
levels (Yang et al., 2019).
Since most of the directions of correlations between ESs
remained unchanged across scales in the BTH region, the influences
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
of changing spatial scales on the trade-offs and synergies between
ESs mainly manifested in the varying strengths of the relationships
between ESs (Fig. 3). The changes in the significance of the re-
lationships between the recreation service and flood mitigation
illustrated that the potential trade-offs or synergies between some
ESs could be obscured at larger spatial scales (Bai et al., 2020; Spake
et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2015). In comparison with the
diverse findings of contrasting or similar relationships between ESs
at different scales in other regions (Felipe-Lucia et al., 2014; Liu
et al., 2017; Qiao et al., 2019), the consistent directions of most
relationships between ESs at the three spatial scales in this study
confirmed the relative stabilities of these inherent relationships in
our study area and further emphasized the context specificity of
scale effects on ESs. Both well-documented trade-offs between the
provisioning service and the other ESs and synergies between the
regulating services and cultural service were observed across all
spatial scales, with the former indicating the possibility to have
detrimental impacts on human well-being and the latter implying
the potential to achieve high provision of multiple services (Dade
et al., 2018; Lee and Lautenbach, 2016; Raudsepp-Hearne et al.,
2010; Torralba et al., 2018; Turkelboom et al., 2018; Xu et al.,
2020b; Yang et al., 2019; Zhong et al., 2020). In particular, it
should be noted that the enhancement of provisioning services did
not inevitably lead to a reduction in regulating services at different
scales (Deng et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2020b). This was exemplified by
food production and carbon sequestration, as the antagonistic
relationship between the two services at the 100 km2 scale
reversed to be synergistic at the 1 km2 and county scales. Conse-
quently, extrapolating the relationships of this pair of ESs from one
scale to another would require carefulness in the lack of simple
scaling rules for the two services (Pan et al., 2020; Qiu et al., 2018;
Su et al., 2020). Comparing the strengths of the trade-offs and
synergies between ESs at three spatial scales helped identify the
most relevant scale at which different ESs were strongly related.
The more severe trade-offs and greater synergies between most ESs
at the 100 km2 scale suggested this to be the critical scale for the
coordination of ES relationships. Reconfiguration of ESBs occurred
at the same spatial scale (Fig. 4). Several bundles of ESs at the 1 km2
scale disappeared when the scale increased, and new ESBs formed
at the two coarser scales. This was likely attributable to the het-
erogeneous distributions of some ESs that varied obviously with
scale, as some of the units at a fine scale did not provide these
services, but a certain level of each service could be found at coarser
scales, and therefore, the bundling of ESs was influenced
(Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson, 2016; Saidi and Spray, 2018;
Spake et al., 2017). In the northwestern BTH region, a broad range of
regulating and cultural services was delivered at high levels at
different scales; hence, the respective ESBs appeared to persist as
the scale changed.
4.2. Multiscale characteristics of the relationships between
ecosystem services and social-ecological drivers
Holistic and in-depth assessments of how social-ecological
drivers impact the spatial patterns and relationships of ESs across
scales are essential for balancing the provision of different ESs
simultaneously and improving ES resilience effectively (Fu et al.,
2013; Qiu et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019b). Service-providing
units were defined as the basic physical units that generate
particular suites of ESs (Andersson et al., 2015; Cortinovis and
Geneletti, 2019; Liu et al., 2018; Sylla et al., 2020). Within
different service-providing units, the heterogeneity of social-
ecological factors changed with scale (Gre ^t-Regamey et al., 2014;
Spake et al., 2017; Steur et al., 2020). As the spatial scale increased,
aggregation of some types of service-providing units could lead to
9
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
the formation of other types of service-providing units with
different features of social-ecological factors and distinct capacities
to deliver ESs (Andersson et al., 2015). Naturally, the social-
ecological factors of service-providing units might differ in the di-
rections and magnitudes of potential impacts on ESs at different
scales.
In the BTH region, the spatial distributions and relationships of
ESs resulted from combinations of social-ecological factors at the
three scales of analysis (Figs. 2e4). Different drivers significantly
affected all six ESs across the spatial scales (Table 1), with the di-
rections of impacts on these services being context-dependent and
the magnitudes of the impacts being scale-dependent (Fig. 5). At all
three spatial scales, the directions of the relationships between
social-ecological drivers and multiple ESs were primarily constant,
which accounted for the robust distributions of these services and
the consistent relationships between them. Different ESs could be
underpinned by common drivers with positive and strong impacts
(Zhang et al., 2020b). For example, prior research not only showed
that topographic position influenced the translocation of soil and
water (Feng et al., 2017, 2020; Peng et al., 2017; Sahle et al., 2019)
but also indicated that sandy soil facilitated quick downward
infiltration of water during brief precipitation events and affected
the soil’s resistance to erosion (Dou et al., 2020; Keeler et al., 2019;
Stürck et al., 2014; Su et al., 2018); thus, both the sand fraction of
the topsoil and elevation were closely related to the supplies of soil
conservation and flood mitigation. As accessibility could intensify
the influence of anthropogenic threats to habitats and remoteness
also has impacts on the recreation potential (Alahuhta et al., 2018;
Paracchini et al., 2014; Qi et al., 2020; Scholte et al., 2018; Torralba
et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2021), the distance to urban areas tended to
be closely associated with biodiversity protection and the recrea-
tion service. It is known that whether the impact of temperature on
food production is positive or negative depends on the context
(Chen et al., 2019; Runting et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2017). For our
study area, temperature primarily exhibited positive relationships
with food production across scales. This driver also exerted positive
impacts on carbon sequestration at the two finer scales by influ-
encing the photosynthesis and light-use efficiency of vegetation (Su
et al., 2020). At different scales, the spatial concordance of the
regulating services and cultural service in the northwestern
mountains was likely to emerge from the impacts of similar sets of
shared drivers, such as the normalized difference vegetation index,
distance to urban areas, sand fraction of the topsoil and elevation.
These shared drivers positively affected multiple ESs and contrib-
uted to both the formation of the corresponding bundle type and
persistent synergies between the regulating services and cultural
service and across scales. In contrast, different from the other ESs,
food production was particularly linked with drivers such as tem-
perature, which led to the spatial segregation of food production
and most other services and brought about the specialized ESBs and
trade-offs between these ESs at different spatial scales. The varying
strength of the synergistic and antagonistic relationships between
ESs could be attributed to differences in the magnitudes of different
drivers’ impacts across the three scales. In particular, the changing
relationships between food production and carbon sequestration at
different scales evidenced and underscored the intricacy of how
social-ecological drivers shape ES relationships. Either the varia-
tions in the magnitudes of drivers’ impacts or the changes in the
kind of dominant drivers across spatial scales could alter ES re-
lationships (Qiu et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2017). The trade-offs between
food production and carbon sequestration at the 100 km2 scale
might be caused by the variant magnitudes of impacts of the
normalized difference vegetation index and temperature. However,
the relationships between food production and carbon sequestra-
tion at the other two scales were possibly due to the distinct types
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
of dominant drivers. The synergy of this pair of services at the
1 km2 scale could be determined by both the normalized difference
vegetation index and temperature. At the county scale, the
normalized difference vegetation index appeared to be the only
common driver that had positive impacts on the two ESs concur-
rently, so this driver played a key role in controlling synergy be-
tween food production and carbon sequestration.
The normalized difference vegetation index was identified as
the most influential driver explaining the provision of the six ESs
across the three spatial scales in the BTH region (Table 1). The
response curves depicted how ESs co-varied along the gradients of
the normalized difference vegetation index at three spatial scales
(Fig. 6). The response diversity and non-linearity of different ESs in
relation to the normalized difference vegetation index at different
scales revealed where the drivers’ positive impacts disproportion-
ately enhanced some services as well as where the potential
thresholds of drivers’ effects induced a reduction in other ESs.
Typically, former studies found that areas with high vegetation
coverage offered diverse and high supplies of regulating services
(Crouzat et al., 2015; Feng et al., 2017; Guerry et al., 2015; Hao et al.,
2019; Liu et al., 2019; Mouchet et al., 2017; Qi et al., 2020; Saidi and
Spray, 2018; Wang et al., 2019a; Yang et al., 2019). The non-linear
growth of the regulating services at the high end of the normal-
ized difference vegetation index gradient broadly confirmed these
findings and further demonstrated the persistence of the driver’s
positive impacts on the bundles of these services across scales. At
similar high levels of the normalized difference vegetation index,
potential thresholds were discovered in the response curves of food
production at different scales, indicating the difficulty of obtaining
high provision of all categories of ESs from the same area (Jaligot
et al., 2019; Qiu and Turner, 2013). Additionally, the sensitivity of
the shapes of response curves to the scale effects differed among
ESs, e.g., the response curves of the recreation service at different
spatial scales. This suggested that fine-scale response curves of
certain services to the social-ecological drivers might not apply at
coarser scales and emphasized the importance of accounting for
spatial scales in monitoring and addressing the relationships be-
tween ESs and their drivers.
4.3. Implications for the hierarchical governance of ecosystem
services
A multiscale understanding of the relationships between ESs
and social-ecological drivers is required to make decisions effec-
tively in the hierarchical governance of ESs (Bai et al., 2020; Biggs
et al., 2017; Congreve and Cross, 2019; Guerry et al., 2015; Liu
et al., 2017; Primmer et al., 2015). Environmental policies and
management strategies should reflect the complexity and speci-
ficity of such relationships at various spatial scales in the BTH re-
gion. Alternative governance choices at one spatial scale do not
necessarily produce similar ES spatial patterns, trade-offs, syn-
ergies or bundles at other scales (Falk et al., 2018; Qiu et al., 2018;
Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson, 2016; Su et al., 2020).
By taking advantage of the relationships between ESs and
social-ecological drivers, a portfolio of sustainable management
policies regarding the duality of land sparing and sharing could be
targeted for sets of services and tailored to different spatial scales
(Hu et al., 2020; Wang and Dai, 2020). The distinct characteristics of
ESBs persisted at the 100 km2 and county scales, with one type of
ESB specializing in the provisioning service and the other focusing
on the regulating services and cultural service. Consequently, it
might be advisable to implement land sparing strategies that
spatially segregate areas prioritized for food production from areas
protected for the other ES at the two spatial scales (Fischer et al.,
2014; Jaligot et al., 2019; Maskell et al., 2013). More trade-offs
10
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
between food production and the other ESs at the 10 km2 scale,
less common drivers facilitating the synergy between food pro-
duction and carbon sequestration at the county scale, and more
evident threshold effects in the response curves of food production
to the influential driver at both coarser scales further supported
that achieving simultaneous supplies of food production and most
other ESs was hard at these two scales and land sparing strategies
would be suitable to alleviate the challenge of coordinating gains
and losses of ESs. Coinciding with land specialization policies such
as the Major Function Oriented Zoning that have been carried out in
the BTH region by the Chinese government (Yang et al., 2019),
different policy measures could be devised to optimize food pro-
duction in the southeastern areas and enhance the synergy be-
tween the other services in the northwestern region. Adjusting the
plan for planting food and oil crops on the basis of temperature’s
positive impact on food production and implementing a sustain-
able agricultural intensification strategy at the two coarser scales in
the southeast of the BTH region would improve the management of
food production (Chen et al., 2019; Sun and Li, 2017; Zhang et al.,
2017). The regulating and cultural services are perceived to
contribute to targets across numerous Sustainable Development
Goals (Wood et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2020a). Therefore, on account of
the positive relationships between this suite of important ESs and
social-ecological drivers such as the normalized difference vege-
tation index, distance to urban areas and elevation, conservation
efforts at the 100 km2 and county scales should concentrate on
preserving vegetation and preventing urban sprawl in the moun-
tainous region (Zhang et al., 2019). Moreover, since the stronger
relationships between ESs at the 100 km2 scale illustrated the
higher relevance of this spatial scale for governing different ESs,
implementing management interventions targeting this particular
scale might have more significant impacts on the provision of ESs.
As the scale changed, the directions of trade-offs and synergies
between most ESs were generally as stable as those for the majority
of the relationships between ESs and social-ecological drivers,
which was beneficial for assuring the vertical coordination of
governance actions at different scales and reducing the unpre-
dictability that might cause indirect effects on ESs (Qiu et al., 2018).
Nevertheless, certain distinct characteristics of ESs and their drivers
at the 1 km2 scale still indicate the need to match suitable man-
agement practices. Each ESB at this scale featured high levels of
some ESs and low levels of others, which indicated the possibility of
realizing different degrees of ES multifunctionality for different
bundle types (Manning et al., 2018). Applying land sharing strate-
gies at the 1 km2 scale would be favourable for the mitigation of
trade-offs between ESs as well as the enrichment of multiple ESs
simultaneously in different ESBs. At this fine scale, although
acknowledging the role of unmanageable drivers in the provision of
ESs, individual management of ecosystems might put more prac-
tical importance on manageable drivers, such as the normalized
difference vegetation index (Dominati et al., 2010; Hao et al., 2019;
Ndong et al., 2020; Schirpke et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2017). For
instance, in light of the positive impacts of the normalized differ-
ence vegetation index on all ESs at the 1 km2 scale, multifunctional
approaches including nature-based solutions and ecological
intensification could be applicable and able to promote diverse
services of ESBs by influencing vegetation (Bommarco et al., 2013;
Cortinovis and Geneletti, 2019; Keeler et al., 2019; Wang et al.,
2019b; Zheng et al., 2019).
4.4. Limitations
This research provided evidence for the relationships between
ESs and social-ecological drivers at different scales in the BTH re-
gion, which yielded informed management choices for the
J. Shen, S. Li, L. Liu et al.
hierarchical governance of ESs. However, our analysis was still
challenged by some limitations. The careful selection of six essen-
tial ESs and ten social-ecological drivers was constrained by data
availability and might have had potential impacts on the inter-
pretation of our results. The incorporation of more ESs and their
drivers into the analysis could provide a more comprehensive and
differentiated picture. There was uncertainty in averaging the
values of different ESs and social-ecological drivers at the coarser
scales. Although the assessments at the 1 km2 and 100 km2 scales
were performed with regular grids, administrative boundaries that
had a wide range of sizes and shapes were used in the analysis at
the county scale. Differences in the ESs and social-ecological drivers
among these spatial scales might be influenced by these inherent
differences in shape and distribution (Roces-Díaz et al., 2018; Spake
et al., 2017). Despite that correlation analysis had provided an
important foundation for understanding the complex ESs re-
lationships in the previous studies, this method could only reflect
the general trends of scatter between paired ESs at different spatial
scales and was unable to identify the mechanistic pathways that
explain the relationships among services (Dade et al., 2018; Hao
et al., 2019; Spake et al., 2017). Exploration of the relationships
between ESs and social-ecological drivers at more spatial scales
could be meaningful for the identification of relevant scales at
which to manage ESs (Xu et al., 2017). At different scales, only the
univariate model-based response curves of ESs to the most influ-
ential driver (i.e., the normalized difference vegetation index) were
depicted. For each ES at each scale, improving the complexity and
specificity of the generalized additive models by including diverse
related social-ecological variables might lead to a more precise
understanding of how ESs vary along the gradients of multiple
drivers. On the basis of the characteristics of relationships between
ESs and social-ecological drivers in the BTH region, the general
guidance for the hierarchical governance of ESs and sustainable
management of regional ecosystems was put forward in the study,
but a more precise and detailed policy design on the sustainable
supplies of ESs and regional sustainability might need advancing
beyond our methodological framework and striving toward a more
transdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, this study merely pre-
sented the situation of ESs and their drivers in the BTH region in
2015, and the temporal dynamics of the relationships between ESs
and social-ecological drivers might be a priority for future
investigation.
5. Conclusions
In order to develop deeper understandings of the scale-
dependent relationships among ESs and social-ecological drivers,
this study investigated the spatial distributions, trade-offs, syn-
ergies, bundles, and underlying drivers of ESs at different spatial
scales in the BTH region, which were fundamentally important for
promoting the supplies of multiple ESs and realizing the sustain-
able development of urban agglomeration. Mapping of the supplies
of six ESs revealed the diverse variations of the spatial patterns of
different services at three scales and underscored the importance
of choosing suitable mapping scales in ES assessment to provide
adequate information and avoid potential misinterpretation of ES
distributions. The consistencies in the directions of trade-offs and
synergies between most ESs at different scales implied the relative
stability of these relationships, and the comparisons among the
strengths of trade-offs and synergies between ESs across scales
were beneficial to determine the relevant and critical scales for
coordinating ESs relationships. Furthermore, the variations in the
significance or the directions of the relationships between certain
ESs across the three scales suggested the complex scaling rules of
these services and stressed the need for caution when
11
Journal of Cleaner Production 290 (2021) 125193
extrapolating these ESs relationships from one scale to another. Our
results provided compelling evidence regarding the scale depen-
dence of bundling ESs. The valuable knowledge on the reconfigu-
ration of ESBs at coarser scales and the richness of ESs varying in
different ESBs could be readily incorporated in designing scale-
specific and spatially-targeted management strategies to address
sustainable challenges of ESs. An enhanced understandings of the
scale impacts of different social-ecological drivers on multiple ESs,
and the better knowledge of the response diversity of different ESs
along the gradients of the normalized difference vegetation index
at different spatial scales, highlighted the significant role of com-
mon social-ecological drivers in shaping the spatial congruency of
ESs across scales and offered crucial guidance for managing these
common drivers to sustain sets of relevant services simultaneously.
Overall, our study suggested that the integration of contextual in-
formation on the multiscale characteristics of the relationships
among ESs and social-ecological drivers into the hierarchical
governance of ESs could foster more scale-specific, effective and
sustainable management and policy decisions for minimizing
trade-offs, maximizing synergies and diversifying bundles of ESs.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jiashu Shen: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology,
Software, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review &
editing. Shuangcheng Li: Funding acquisition, Project administra-
tion, Resources, Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Laibao
Liu: Software, Resources, Data curation. Ze Liang: Formal analysis,
Writing - review & editing. Yueyao Wang: Visualization, Investi-
gation. Huan Wang: Investigation. Shuyao Wu: Writing - review &
editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the financial support provided by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number:
41590843].
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125193.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China [grant number: 41590843].
Data availability
The research data was confidential.
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