Ecosystem services have rapidly changed at the global and regional scales in recent years. Exploring the driving mechanisms of ecosystem services change and projecting future change are of increasing importance to inform policy and decision-making options for ecosystem conservation and sustainable use. Although some research has analyzed the influences of land use or climate changes on ecosystem services, a systematic review on the mechanisms of ecosystem services change has not been carried out so far. This work elaborated on the mechanisms of ecosystem services change based on a literature review, and reached four main conclusions. (1) Climate change and land use jointly determine the ecosystem services change through complex and interacting pathways. (2) Whereas the present research progresses mainly focus on the identification of a single influencing factor, they fail in the determination of multiple influencing factors. (3) Although multi-scenario simulations based on remote sensing and climate models are the main means used to predict future changes in ecosystem services, clarifying the interactive mechanisms of multiple factors is the precondition for future projection of ecosystem services change; (4) Therefore, future research should strengthen the analysis and simulation of the effects of human activities on ecosystem services, especially the development of technology to detect the dynamic responses of ecosystem services to major ecological projects, which is crucial to the selection of restoration measures and the regional arrangement of ecosystem conservation projects.

Ecological compensation is an important part of ecological civilization which has gained widespread attention in academia in recent years. This study uses the knowledge graph tool CiteSpace to identify and analyze the literature related to ecological compensation research published in academic journals in the CNKI database, in order to provide an objective and scientific reference for the research in this field. The results show that the domestic research on ecological compensation began to appear around 2000, and the first research boom was ushered in starting in 2009. Most studies have explored ecological compensation from the connotation of ecological compensation, compensation subjects and objects, compensation standards, compensation methods, compensation supervision and evaluation of compensation effects, etc., and the articles on ecological compensation standards are relatively more abundant. At the same time, ecological compensation research is often linked to the realization of ecosystem service value and ecological product value. In the future, researchers should focus on establishing and improving the ecological compensation standard accounting system, exploring the market-based ecological compensation mechanism, attaching importance to the ecological compensation fund distribution mechanism, and strengthening research related to ecological compensation effect assessment. Ecological compensation theory should be developed in the direction of deepening and providing new research perspectives for helping China to deal with the relationship between conservation and development.

Agricultural production is considered one of the most important sources of water quality deterioration in the Taihu Lake Basin, China. Crop farming, livestock & poultry breeding and aquaculture are primary agricultural non-point sources and their impacts on the water environment are, in most cases, evaluated separately. Therefore, it is a challenge for current research to consider all of the different agricultural non-point sources as a whole and assess their combined influence on the water environment. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the conjoint impact that agricultural non-point sources such as crop farming, livestock & poultry breeding and aquaculture have had on the local water environment in the Taihu Lake Basin by taking Huzhou City of Zhejiang Province as a case study. To achieve this, a new, innovative approach named the “Waste Absorption Footprint” (WAF) is applied. The results show that nitrogen and phosphorus pollution generated by agricultural production are more serious than that of organic substances, while aquaculture and crop farming are more critical pollution sources compared with livestock and poultry breeding, and so they should be the focus of environmental management and pollution control initiatives. There is a regional discrepancy in the spatial distribution of agricultural non-point source pollution across counties and districts, which provides information for determining the key regions for the treatment of agricultural pollution. This study demonstrates that the WAF method can make a comprehensive assessment of the influence of agricultural production on the water environment and provide references for the control and management of agricultural non-point source pollution, which is of great importance for management of the water environment.