Ecosystem services in National Park of Hainan Tropical Rainforest of China: Spatiotemporal dynamics and conservation implications

•It is the first time to quantify ecosystem services of National Park of Hainan Tropical Rainforest for seven different regions in 2000, 2010 and 2019.•The establishment of the national park effectively improved ecosystem services.•National park had the main ecosystem services of water conservation, carbon storage and oxygen release, while showed considerable spatial heterogeneity.•Conservation priorities were assigned to natural forests in high-altitude areas, mostly in central parts of the national park. Hainan island in south China harbours vast areas of virgin forests, with rich biodiversity and is included in the globally important Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot. In 2018, a national park covering an area of 4269 km2 of the island was proposed to conserve its rainforest ecosystem integrity and authenticity. In this study, using an integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs (InVEST) model, a revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE), a net primary productivity transformation formula, and the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model, we quantified five ecosystem services, i.e. water conservation, soil retention, carbon storage, oxygen release and biodiversity maintenance. The data of five ecosystem services was recorded in the year 2000, 2010 and 2019, for seven regions of the national park including Mt. Jianfeng (JFL), Mt. Bawang (BWL), Mt. Diaoluo (DLS), Mt. Limu (LMS), Mt. Yingge (YGL), Mt. Wuzhi (WZS), and Maorui Forest Farm (MR). Then, we determined the importance of each of the ecosystem services for each region. Finally, we determined conservation priority sites of every regions respectively for each ecosystem service by comparing conservation efficiencies with the help of ordered weighted averaging. We found that total and mean amounts of five ecosystem services in the national park had declined in 2010 but increased in 2019, indicating the establishment of the national park effectively improved ecosystem services. Over 65 % areas of the national park exhibited dominant ecosystem services of water conservation, carbon storage and oxygen release. Soil retention was relatively uniform in seven regions, whereas the water conservation was concentrated in the eastern part of the national park, i.e. YGL, LMS, WZS and DLS. Carbon storage and oxygen release were highest at the central part of the national park including WZS, DLS, YGL, BWL, and MR, while biodiversity maintenance was the top ecosystem service for WZS, DLS, BWL and MR. Conservation