Assessment and prediction of carbon storage based on land use/land cover dynamics in the coastal area of Shandong Province

Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) promote regional carbon storage capacity or trigger carbon depletion, which in turn exhibited significant impact on global climate change. Understanding the impacts of LULC on changes of carbon storage in coastal areas plays a critical role in the conservation of regional ecosystems and sustainable socio-economic development. The present study acted the coastal area of Shandong Province as an example to analyze the relationship between LULC and carbon storage combined with the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) and Patch-generating Land Use Simulation (PLUS) model. We further predicted the variation of carbon storage through the change of LULC types under three scenarios in 2030. Our results showed that cropland (which decreased by 9.41%) and built-up land (which increased by 7.66%) un-derwent the most significant changes over the past 20 years, while forest, grassland, wetland, water and bare land underwent less changes. As the dominant land type, cropland was also the most important carbon pool with medium carbon storage. Areas with high carbon storage were distributed in the mountains and hills, where the main land types were grassland and forest. In addition, wetland located in the Yellow River Delta also stores large amounts of carbon. Accordingly, areas with low carbon storage were widely distributed in built-up land of urban metropolitan regions. We pinpointed that the carbon storage in the coastal area of Shandong Province lost 47.96x106Mg due to the increasing of built-up land and the decreasing of cropland and forest, while ecological protection measures would effectively enhance regional carbon storage. Specifically, the regional carbon storage could be increased by 6.64x106Mg when the conversion of cropland, forest and grassland into built-up land was reduced by 20% and the conversion of wetland and water into built-up land was reduced by 30% (under the ecological priority scenario (EP)). We believe the present study could be a valid reference for administrators to develop policies in more reasonable planning of land use and urban development to achieve carbon peaking and carbon neutrality ("Dual Carbon" goals).