RESEARCH ARTICLE Land management to reconcile ecosystem services supply and demand mismatches—A case study in Shanghai municipality, China Bo Jiang 1 | Yang Bai 2 | Junyu Chen 3 | Juha M. Alatalo 4,5 | Xibao Xu 6 | Gang Liu 7 | Qing Wang 8 1 Changjiang Water Resources Protection Institute, Wuhan, China 2 Center for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China 3 School of Business, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China 4 Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar 5 Environmental Science Center, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar 6 Key Laboratory of Watershed Geographic Sciences, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China 7 State Key Laboratory of Hydrology Water Resource and Hydraulic Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, China 8 Institute of Applied Ecology, Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, Shanghai, China Correspondence Yang Bai, Center for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun Town, Jinghong, Yunnan, China. Email: youngbcs@gmail.com Funding information Key Laboratory of Watershed Geographic Sciences, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant/Award Number: NIGLAS2016QY02; National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 41771571, 41601616 Abstract City managers need to understand how land use and land cover (LULC) change in an urban landscape can affect future land degradation and conditions for ecosystem ser- vices (ESs) supply and demand. Optimal land use and land management requires explicit spatial mapping of ESs supply and demand under alternative land use scenar- ios. In this study, we applied spatially explicit models to predict changes in ESs supply and demand, and their coupling mechanisms, under one baseline scenario and three stakeholder-defined LULC change scenarios (developed, planning, policy) in Shanghai municipality, China. The results suggest that the policy scenario could significantly increase ESs supply and restore degraded urban areas, but would not guarantee that supply meets demand for four key ESs tested: water retention, particulate matter removal, carbon sequestration, and recreation. However, the policy scenario signifi- cantly reduced the shortfalls and spatial mismatches in water retention, particulate matter removal and recreation services, and also greatly restored deficit areas for all four ESs. This is valuable scientific evidence that ESs supply and demand information can be incorporated into urban land management planning in a spatially explicit man- ner, in order to control or prevent future potential land degradation. KEYWORDS coupling mechanisms, implications, mapping, models, scenarios, urbanization 1 | INTRODUCTION Urban expansion, characterized by a dramatic increase in impervious surface, is regarded as one of the most important factors affecting regional land degradation (Foley et al., 2005; Turner, Lambin, & Reenberg, 2007). It leads to landscape fragmentation and biodiversity habitat loss, which can have irreversible negative environmental and ecological consequences, such as loss of ecosystem services (ESs) and environmental pollution (Wang et al., 2018; Zhang, Fu, Zeng, Geng, & Hassani, 2013). Devising ways to effectively manage urban expansion Received: 30 August 2018 Revised: 7 February 2020 Accepted: 14 March 2020 DOI: 10.1002/ldr.3614 Land Degrad Dev. 2020;1–16. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ldr © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1