Linking ecological resilience and ecosystem services to inform spatial conservation planning

Balancing ecosystem service provision with long-term ecosystem stability remains a critical challenge for sustainable land management. Here, we develop a spatial planning framework that integrates ecological resilience—the capacity of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations—with ecosystem services to identify priority areas for ecological restoration. Applying this framework to the Loess Plateau of China, we evaluate three management strategies—Service Priority, Balanced Priority, and Resilience Priority—to delineate restoration priorities. Our results indicate that ecosystem services have generally improved from 2000 to 2020, while resilience exhibits a turning point, shifting from an increasing to a declining trend. Spatial overlay analyses further show that areas with enhanced ecosystem service supply coincide with declining resilience, indicating a spatial mismatch between service gains and resilience loss. The three prioritization scenarios produce distinct spatial patterns, highlighting the importance of balanced strategies that reconcile short-term service gains with long-term ecosystem resilience to inform sustainable restoration and land management. Areas with increasing ecosystem service supply from 2000 to 2020 spatially overlap with declining resilience in the Loess Plateau, revealing mismatches between service gains and resilience losses, based on a multi-scenario spatial prioritization framework.