Water Ecosystem Service Quality Evaluation and Value Assessment of Taihu Lake in China

Abstract

Taihu Lake is the third largest freshwater lake in China. Water ecosystems play an important role in the survival and development of human society. The evaluation of water ecosystem services is helpful to understand and grasp the changing rules of Taihu Lake’s ecosystem services value in recent years. First, we used the Water Environment Qualities Index (WQI) to evaluate the water ecological quality of Taihu Lake; second, on the basis of the survey data from 2010 to 2018, we combined economic and ecological methods to evaluate the water ecosystem of Taihu Lake. The evaluation system includes four major service functions, 11 second-class evaluation indicators and 19 index factor. Research indicates that, (1) in the past 8 years, the WQI of Taihu Lake increased year by year and Taihu Lake changed from moderate pollution to light pollution; (2) provisioning services are the main service of Taihu Lake’s water ecosystem and the order of various service values was provisioning service value > regulation service value > cultural service value > support service value, with water supply as the core function of provisioning services; and (3) the total values in 2010, 2014, and 2018 were 115.39 billion yuan, 113.31 billion yuan, and 119.96 billion yuan, respectively, showing a trend of first decreasing and then increasing. To a certain extent, the improvement in Taihu Lake’s water ecological quality has led to an increase in the value of regulation services.