Environmental managers and policymakers increasingly discuss trade-offs between ecosystem services (ESs). However, few studies have used nonlinear models to provide scenario-specific land-use planning. This study determined the effects of different future land use/land cover (LULC) scenarios on ESs in the Yili River Valley, China, and analyzed the trade-offs and synergistic response characteristics. We simulated land-use changes in the Yili River Valley during 2020–2030 under three different scenarios using a patch-generating land-use simulation (PLUS) model—business as usual (BAU), economic development (ED), and ecological conservation (EC). Subsequently, we evaluated the water yield (WY), carbon storage (CS), soil retention (SR), and nutrient export (NE) ESs by combining the PLUS and integrated valuation of ecosystem services and trade-offs (InVEST) models, thus exploring multiple trade-offs among these four ESs at a regional scale. For the BAU scenario, there are some synergistic effects between WY and SR in the Yili River Valley, in addition to significant trade-off effects between CS and NE. For the ED scenario, the rapid expansion of cropland and constructed land is at the expense of forested grassland, leading to a significant decline in ESs. For the EC scenario, the model predicted that the cumulative regional net future carbon storage, cumulative water retention, and cumulative soil conservation would all increase due to ecological engineering and the revegetation of riparian zones and that formerly steep agricultural land can be effective in improving ESs. Meanwhile, the trade-off effect would be significantly weakened between CS and NE. These results can inform decision makers on specific sites where ecological engineering is implemented. Our findings can enhance stakeholders’ understanding of the interactions between ESs indicators in different scenarios.

Water constraints disturb and damage the growth and development of grassland vegetation mainly through both atmospheric and soil pathways. In the background of rapid climate change in the future, the impacts of water constraints on grasslands are expected to further deepen. However, current studies lack reports exploring the frequency, intensity, and area of land-atmospheric compound drought on carbon indicators in grassland ecosystems. In this study, we analyze the response of China grasslands to dual terrestrial-atmospheric water constraint events using ISIMIP gross primary productivity (GPP) data to reveal the carbon cycle-climate feedback relationships over the Chinese grassland. We found that the occurrence probability of compound drought events (i.e. land-atmospheric water constraint) was 3–4 times higher than that of random drought events, and the frequency, intensity, and affected area of compound droughts were significantly higher than that of single droughts. Compound droughts caused a decline of up to 20.27% in GPP of grassland ecosystems in China, while the decline of single atmospheric drought or soil drought was only 12.34% and 14.32%. Which is because vapor pressure deficit and soil moisture are a set of strongly coupled bivariate variables, and the continued strengthening of the land-atmospheric feedback causes a higher probability of occurrence of compound drought events and an increased impact on ecosystem GPP.