Ecosystem services (ESs) assessment plays a significant role in managing ecological resources. Uncovering the complex interdependencies between ESs and their key drivers is an essential preliminary step toward the coordinated management of ESs. Currently, a major challenge lies in precisely evaluating trade-offs and synergies among ESs across different spatial and temporal scales, particularly in capturing their dynamic evolution and determinants. This study focuses on the Tuo River Basin in China, quantifying four key ESs, namely, habitat quality (HQ), nitrogen export (NE), soil conservation (SC), and water yield (WY), and assessing their interactions from 2000 to 2020 at both grid and county scales. Moreover, this study explored the social-ecological driving factors influencing these ESs. The results showed that (1) SC and WY in the region exhibited an increasing trend, HQ and NE declined, and ESs at the county scale showed a central collapse feature; (2) synergies between HQ–NE, HQ–WY, and SC–WY pairs generally increased, the relationships between NE–SC and NE–WY pairs showed slight fluctuations, and there was a decline in the synergies within the HQ–SC pair; and (3) the interplay of all drivers positively affected ESs, with land use/land cover being the most significant and GDP exerting a lower influence. ES assessment results exhibited distinctive characteristics at two scales. Based on these findings, management strategies that incorporate both scales and cross policy boundaries are proposed to effectively meet management objectives. These results can facilitate improved synergy between regional ecological protection and economic development.

Facing future complex climate changes and global economic fluctuations, land use and land cover (LULC) simulation is recognized as an important initiative to support government decision-making. In this study, a comprehensive LULC simulation modeling framework was proposed based on the PLUS and InVEST models. The Kinki metropolis in Japan was chosen as a case to simulate future LULC changes under four SSP–RCP (126, 245, 370, and 585) scenarios, and to calculate carbon storage (CS) from 2040 to 2100. The results show that cultivated land will decrease while forests will increase, except under scenario SSP585. The artificial surface will increase except under SSP370. The CS changes are significantly correlated with forest area changes. Furthermore, this study highlights the significance of analyzing and discussing future LULCs under wide-area planning. Spatial pattern, morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), and Pearson correlation analysis were used to explore the characteristics of the LULC types. The results reveal that the prefectures within the Kinki metropolitan area can be classified into three groups based on the spatial pattern indices change of the artificial surface. Most cultivated land is concentrated in important patches and corridors (area larger than 40,000 m²), accounting for over 90% of the total area, while the number is less than 25%. Forests will become more aggregated, and different MSPA classes will have varying impacts on CS changes. This study comprehensively analyzed and validated the feasibility of the simulation results from different LULC perspectives, comparing the similarities and differences in the development of prefectures. Additionally, this research provides a comprehensive framework for integrating simulated LULC types with policy discussions to better guide LULC planning and policy formulation in metropolitan Kinki.

As metropolitan areas (MAs) become increasingly complex, reconciling land development with ecological protection has become a major challenge in spatial governance. Although ecological security patterns (ESPs) are widely used to assess ecological networks, they are often treated as diagnostic outputs after simulation rather than directly incorporated into land use/land cover (LULC) simulation processes. In addition, conventional ecosystem health assessments commonly assign uniform values to broad LULC classes, thereby overlooking variations among patches within the same class. This study proposes a spatially explicit framework that integrates forest-centered ESPs into LULC simulation as scenario-specific conversion constraints. It also applies a modified Pressure–Vitality–Organization (P–V–O) model that incorporates explicit socioeconomic pressures instead of relying on uniform, class-based resilience values and assesses ecosystem health separately for each LULC type. The framework was applied to the Tokyo, Chubu, and Kinki MAs in Japan. From 2000 to 2020, forest-corridor configurations evolved differently among the three MAs. Declines in forest connectivity were more pronounced in Tokyo and Chubu, whereas Kinki remained comparatively stable. Patch-scale ecosystem health showed marked spatial heterogeneity within cultivated land, grassland, and shrubland, and its temporal trends varied among MAs and LULC types. Simulations for 2050 under the Urban Priority, Business-as-Usual, and Ecological Priority scenarios showed that increasing levels of ecological protection imposed progressively broader constraints on land conversion, resulting in region-specific patterns of urban expansion, cultivated land change, and forest retention. The proposed framework shows how ESPs and patch-level ecosystem health information can be operationalized as spatial planning constraints, providing a practical basis for comparing development and conservation priorities and supporting differentiated LULC planning across MAs.