Assessment on Water Ecosystem Services in the Songhua River Basin by AHP Method

The purpose of this paper is to establish an evaluation system to estimate the water ecosystem services in the Songhua River Basin. According to the MA´s classification, this paper groups water ecosystem services into four categories comprised of provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting. On the basis, the paper assesses the sixteen important significant indexes for the Songhua River Basin by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The results show that the weight of regulating, provisioning, supporting and cultural respectively is 0.467, 0.278, 0.160, 0.095. The ranking of sixteen services is water storage> flood mitigation> water supply> climate regulation> nutrient cycling> aquatic product> biodiversity maintenance> water purification> research and education> hydropower> soil formation> recreation> shipping> river transportation> retention of soils> spiritual aesthetics.