Impacts of Future Land Use Change on Ecosystem Service Trade-Offs and Synergies in Water-Abundant Cities: A Case Study of Wuhan, China

Under rapid urbanization, water-abundant cities face severe challenges of ecological space compression and ecosystem service (ES) degradation. This study focuses on Wuhan, a representative water-abundant city, integrating the PLUS model, InVEST model, correlation analysis, and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to simulate land use patterns in 2040 under three scenarios: natural development (ND), ecological protection (EP), and urban expansion (UE). We quantitatively assessed the spatiotemporal evolution of carbon storage (CS), water yield (WY), soil conservation (SC), and habitat quality (HQ), along with the trade-offs/synergies among these ES. The results reveal that the continuous expansion of construction land in Wuhan has extensively encroached upon cultivated land and water bodies. Although the woodland area increased, it was insufficient to offset the negative impacts of construction land expansion on ES. Under the ND scenario, ES declined by 1.89% to 5.33%. The EP scenario, by implementing ecological protection measures and restricting construction land expansion, enhanced ES by 1.4% to 10%. Conversely, the UE scenario saw construction land increase by over 60%, triggering a chain reaction of “urban expansion—reduction of cultivated land—encroachment on woodland/water bodies”, leading to a 4.77% to 10.75% decline in ES. Furthermore, this study uncovered complex interrelationships among ES: synergistic relationships generally prevailed among CS, SC, and HQ; trade-offs characterized the relationships between WY and both CS and HQ; and the relationship between WY and SC dynamically shifted between trade-off and synergy depending on land use patterns. Urban expansion (UE) intensified trade-off conflicts among ES, whereas ecological protection (EP) alleviated most trade-offs. However, water body expansion under EP weakened the synergy between CS and HQ due to the inherent characteristics of aquatic ecosystems (high HQ but low carbon sequestration). This research provides a scientific basis for water-abundant cities to coordinate development and ecological protection, informing the formulation of differentiated land use policies to optimize ES synergies.