Proposing multicriteria decision based valuation of ecosystem services for fragmented landscape in mountainous environment

Abstract Landscape structure or fragmentations have important effects on ecosystem services, with a common assumption being that fragmentation effects can reduce ecosystem services provision. Impact of Land use land cover (LULC) change on ecosystem service value is well explored techniques in recent times, but landscape fragmentation effect on ecosystem services value (ESV) is yet not quantitatively explored. The present work has intended to focus on the fragmentation effect on ESV introducing a new approach along with the effect of LULC change on ESV. All the analysis is done considering four times (1991, 2001, 2011, 2019) from Landsat images. Fragmentation analysis in ArcGis software has generated six hierarchic landscape units like patch, edge, perforated, small core, medium core and large core. For showing fragmentation effect ESV is computed for a typical LULC as a whole using Coefficient value (CV) of Costanza, 1997 and 2014 and ESV of the fragmented landscapes using weighted CV based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Result has clearly demonstrated that due to fragmentation of forest and water body, a major means of qualitative degradation of eco-region, ESV of the respective lands have reduced from 24.43 to 20.57 million USD/year from 1991 to 2019. Total ESV of agriculture and built up land were respectively 43.62 and 4.15 million USD in 1991 and it was changed to 37.92 and 5.85 million USD in 2019. Computed ESV of forest without considering fragmentation effect is 14.68 million USD/year but it is diminuend only 5.71 million USD/year if fragmentation effect is considered in 2019. The ESV of the water body is six times lower in the fragmented landscape as per 2019. Anthropogenic effects have a paramount role for growing land use change, fragmentation and change of ESV in a natural landscape.