Acute farmland expansion and rapid urbanization in Central Asia have accelerated land use/land cover changes, which has significant effect onecosystemservice. However, the spatio-temporal changes in ecosystem service values in Central Asia are not well understood. Here, based on land use products with 300-m resolution for the years of 1995, 2005 and 2015 and transfer methodology, we predicted LUCC for 2025 and 2035 using CA-Markov, assessed changes in ecosystem service value in response to LUCC dynamics, and explored the elasticity for the response of ESV to LULC changes. We found significant expansions of cropland and urban and shrinking of water bodies and bare land during 1995-2035. Overall ESVs had an increasing trend from 1995-2035, which was mainly due to the increasing cropland and construction land. The combined valueofecosystemservices of cropland, grassland, water bodies accounted for over 90% of the total ESVs. However, LULC analysis showed that the area of water body reduced by 21.80% from 1995 to 2015 and continued to decrease by 21.14% from 2015 to 2035, indicating that approximately 63.37 billion US$ of ESVs lost in Central Asia. Biodiversity, food production and water regulation were major service functions, accounting for 80.52% of the total ESVs . Our results demonstrated that theeffective land-usepolicies should be made to control farmland expansion and protect water bodies, grassland and forestland for better sustainable ecosystem services.
Variations in ecosystem service value in response to land use/land cover changes in Central Asia over 1995-2035