Land use and land cover change (LUCC) exerts substantial influence on ecosystem service values (ESV). But conventional ESV valuation approaches frequently neglect temporal shifts in crop economic returns. Integrating high-resolution land use data (2000–2020) with the Patch-generating Land Use Simulation (PLUS) model—and augmenting it with spatial econometric analysis—we project 2030 land use configurations under four policy-relevant scenarios: Business-as-Usual (BAU), Economic Development Priority (EDP), Ecological Protection Priority (EPP), and Ecological Economic Balance (EEB). Under EDP, construction land expands by 5.52%, critically low-ESV areas increase by 476.83 km 2 (a 2.7-fold surge relative to the 2010–2020 period), and net ESV declines by 1.04%. By contrast, EPP achieves a 10.19% reduction in urban land through targeted ecological restoration, effectively arresting ESV degradation. High-value ESV zones are concentrated in water bodies and forests, which dominate regional regulating services. The three-province in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River epitomizes the inherent tension between rapid urbanization and ESV conservation. These findings provide a basis for assessing the social, economic and environmental factors. Furthermore, the results provide a new solution approach for formulating differentiated ecological environment protection policies in the study area and addressing key technical challenges in land use planning for large-scale ecological functional area.
EMER et al. (2026) studied this question.