Spatial zoning to enhance ecosystem service co-benefits for sustainable land-use management in the Yangtze River economic Belt, China

[Display omitted] •We propose a cost-effective multi-zoning approach with multiple management zones for ESs management.•It enhances the co-benefits of compatible ESs and reduces the trade-offs of incompatible ESs.•Integrating ESs with socioeconomic costs to prioritize the spatial allocation of management zones.•Systematic conservation planning for ESs is urgent for sustainable development. Integrating ecosystem services (ESs) into the land spatial planning can provide innovative insights for coordinating the spatial conflict between ecological protection and economic development so as to promoting regional sustainable development. However, current studies mostly focus on spatial identification and optimization of ecological protection areas to enable the maintenance of specific ESs, while ignoring human development needs and their impact on ecological protection. For this reason, based on the systematic conservation planning theory, this study proposed a cost-effective multi-zoning method with multiple management zones subject to corresponding management requirements of conservation or development to achieve the sustainable maintenance of multiple ESs that are compatible or incompatible. An empirical study of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) demonstrates how this systematic multi-zoning approach may be utilized to combine five ESs and three conservation costs to prioritize the spatial distribution of management zones under different management strategies. Our findings revealed significant differences in the spatial scale and priority of various management zones determined by the spatial characteristics of the ESs and the conservation costs associated with different management strategies or scenarios. Among all scenarios, scenario 4 allows for the simultaneous achievement of protection goals for all selected ESs with minimal spaces of management zones. Further conclude that the more flexible multi-zone configuration strategy can increase the opportunities to enhance the co‐benefits of compatible ESs by allocating its conservation targets to the same function zone, and reduces the trade-offs between incompatible ESs by avoiding the allocation of conservation targets in the same function zone. This method and relevant results can provide decision-making support for the land-use sustainable management and holistic land spatial planning of the YREB.