Linking land use structure to ecosystem service enhancement potential: Implications for sustainable land management in the Poyang Lake Basin

Achieving synergistic enhancement of ecosystem services (ESs) through sustainable land management is a key pathway toward regional sustainability. Land use, as a core factor associated with ecosystem services, interacts with other socio-ecological factors to affect ES supply and ecosystem service enhancement potential (ESEP). This study employed the Production Possibility Frontier (PPF) method to quantify two ES in the Poyang Lake Basin (PLB) and their enhancement potential. Path analysis revealed the pathways through which socio-ecological factors were associated with ESEP. Furthermore, by constructing a land use deviation index (LDI), the relationship between land use structure and ESEP was further investigated. The results indicated that among the selected variables, farmland ratio showed the strongest conditional association with ESEP, with standardized path coefficients of 0.290 and −0.447 in water purification-dominated and grain production-dominated areas, respectively. LDI showed a significant negative correlation with ESEP, with an adjusted R 2 = 0.52 when considering both farmland and forest land. This suggested that land use structure was most strongly associated with ESEP and that optimizing it may enable synergies among ES through sustainable land management. Based on the relationship between LDI and ESEP, the sub-basins with the lowest 20% of LDI values were identified as farmland and forest land priority enhancement areas, thereby facilitating more efficient and sustainable land management. This study provides a spatially explicit framework linking ESEP with land use structure to identify where targeted land management interventions may generate greater synergistic gains in multiple ESs.