Abstract
The ecosystem of plateau mountain cities is highly vulnerable to damage and possesses limited ecological resilience. Influenced by human activities, they face prominent issues such as ecosystem degradation. Scenario-based analysis of land use and ecosystem services (ESs) is therefore essential for ensuring ecological sustainability in such regions, taking Kunming, a typical plateau mountain city, as the study area. We employed an integrated modeling approach that combined Markov-FLUS and InVEST to examine water yield, soil conservation, carbon storage, and habitat quality under different land use scenarios from 2030 to 2050. Trade-offs/synergies among ESs were examined through Spearman correlation analysis. Results demonstrate that: (1) Under the natural development scenario (NDS), construction land will expand substantially. Under the cropland protection scenario (CPS), construction land will expand slightly, and cropland will increase. Under the ecological protection scenario (EPS), forest land and grassland will increase, while construction land will remain almost unchanged. (2) Under NDS and CPS, water yield will increase, mainly in the metropolitan center of Kunming and its adjacent areas. However, soil conservation, carbon storage, and habitat quality will decrease in these areas. Under EPS, water yield will decrease, while soil conservation, carbon storage, and habitat quality will increase. (3) There will be a trade-off enhancement of ESs in Kunming under NDS, while synergies will be enhanced under CPS and EPS. This study provides a scientific foundation for the adjustment of land use structure, the optimization of ecosystems, and sustainable urban development in cities with similar plateau mountain characteristics.
Similar content being viewed by others
Funding
This research was supported by the Scientific Research Fund of Yunnan Provincial Education Department, China (2026J0604), the Western Program of National Social Science Fund of China (22XJY024) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42062020).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, Y., Zhang, K. & Wei, S. Multi-scenario simulation of spatiotemporal changes of land use and ecosystem services in the plateau mountain city. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-53738-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-53738-3
