Evaluation of cultivated land ecosystem service value in the black soil region of Northeast China

Black soil, a globally scarce resource, is essential to ensure food security and eradicate hunger, especially in China. Given the acute threats confronting cultivated land in Northeast China's Black Soil Region and the sluggish progress in conservation initiatives, understanding the latent potential value of their ecosystem services has become methodologically imperative. This study therefore enhances the assessment of cultivated land ecosystem service value (ESV) in this region by innovatively integrating resource scarcity-induced relative price variations and temporal discounting into the Equivalent Value Factors (EVF) method. Our methodology enables both current valuation and simulation of future ESV trajectories. The results indicate that the overall ecosystem service value of cultivated land in the black soil region of Northeast China shows a trend of first increasing and then decreasing, and has great potential, with a total value of 15 985.39 billion yuan. The results of this study can provide an important reference for the quantification of cultivated land ecological compensation standards in the black soil region of Northeast China. Furthermore, the insights provided by this study can offer new perspectives for future resource and environmental assessments.