Livelihoods as mediators: Unraveling the ecosystem services-human well-being nexus in the desert steppe of inner Mongolia, China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ecosystem services (ES) and Human well-being (HWB) constitute two fundamental components of sustainable development. However, the intricate interdependence and feedback between them are difficult to quantify. Livelihoods serve as critical mediators between ES and HWB, providing a novel approach to examine their interactions. This study took desert steppe area of Inner Mongolia, China as the study area, by integrating the sustainable livelihood framework, analyzed livelihoods, well-being, and ES at the household scale, revealed the interactions among ES, livelihoods, and HWB at three levels by the path analysis model. Results showed natural and financial capitals were the main constraints on pastoral livelihoods. ES (grass yield, water yield, soil conservation, and carbon storage) increased southward, while firewood supply and carrying capacity of livestock showed spatial heterogeneity. Objective well-being (OWB) remained low despite high subjective well-being (SWB), reflecting material-psychological disparities. Overall, ES enhanced OWB, while livelihood capitals paradoxically degraded ES yet improved OWB. At the subtypes level, regulatory service positively impacted OWB, natural capital negatively affected provisioning and regulatory service. Natural, physical, human, and social capitals improved OWB. At the indicator level, livelihood capitals, such as adult male labor and other factors were identified as critical mediated factors. The study advances ES-HWB theoretical frameworks, offering actionable insights for balancing ecological conservation and pastoral households’ well-being in arid ecosystems. • Quantified ecosystem services-livelihoods-well-being relationships across three levels using path analysis. • Natural and financial capitals are key constraints to pastoral livelihoods. • Ecosystem services showed clear spatial heterogeneity at the household scale. • Livelihood capitals degraded ecosystem services but improved objective well-being. • Key livelihood factors (e.g., adult male labor) mediated ecosystem services-well-being links.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".