Progress of research regarding the trade-offs of ecosystem services

The extreme intensification of human activities and global climate change have exerted immense pressure on the ecological environment. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Services Assessment, approximately 60% of ecosystem services are in decline globally. Therefore, to better maintain ecological health, promote human well-being, and achieve more sustainability in harmonizing environmental protection and socio-economic development, there remains an urgent need to summarize recent studies on the trade-offs of ecosystem services. In this study, based on the Web of Science Core Collection Database (WOS) and the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), CiteSpace was used to determine the current situation and analyze the latest research on ecosystem services trade-offs by choosing different techniques to create a co-citation cluster view of the citations, a knowledge map of the co-occurrence of subject structure, and a key word emergence map. The results showed that: 1) the trade-offs between ecosystem services are affected by external risks and human needs at the ecosystem level, parameter selection and service providers at the landscape level, and regional differences and heterogeneity at the regional level. 2) Research methods mainly include three categories: trade-off analysis based on relationship recognition and concrete characterization, a module-based quantitative analysis of trade-off simulation and prediction, and multi-criterion analysis toward the optimization of ecosystem service trade-off management. 3) Urbanization, ecological engineering, and climate change are three key drivers of the trade-offs associated with ecosystem services. Most of the trade-offs between supply services, regulation, and support services are caused by urbanization. Ecological engineering improves ecosystem regulation and support services, but reduces supply services to some extent. Global climate change increases external risks while decreasing ecosystem service provision, regulation, and support functions. Based on this analysis, understanding the associated characteristics of ecosystem service trade-offs at various research levels, modifying and innovating study methods, identifying the major factors, and finally, integrating resources to build a data-sharing platform for ecosystem service trade-offs should be the focus of future research.