The evaluation on China desert and sandy land ecosystem services is one of the core contents of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). The work of MA vastly promotes the research on ecosystem services in the worldwide development. So the ecosystem services are the hotspot of the international ecological researches. 

In this paper, scientists from CAREERI (Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute) deeply analyzed the structure of ecological system and the relationship of the ecological processes and services, and evaluated the values of China desert and sandy land ecosystem services. Therefore, the evaluation on the desert ecosystem services has important practical significance on the acknowledgement to the desert ecosystem importance and management on the ecosystem. 

Desert ecosystem is a wide distributed system in the global biosphere, and also an important subsystem in the land ecosystem. Based on the water process, water balance and water regulated function of the desert ecosystem, in this paper, scientists calculated the water resources flow in the water supply for the daily use and other economic sections, salt production, water resources purification and storage and climate regulation, and combined with the different type of ecosystem service price flux. The results show that the desert and sandy land ecosystem service of water regulation was 5510.05×10⁸¥ per year, and within it the provisioning services value was about 370.42×10⁸¥ per year, the regulating services value was about 5139.63×10⁸¥ per year, and the two service accounted to the total value 6.72% and 93.28%, respectively. 

This program was financially supported by the National Sci-tech Support Program (2011BAC07B05) and the Forestry Public Services Industry Special Fund (201004010-05). This paper has been published on the Journal of Desert Research, Vol.33 No.5, Sep. 2013. Full text please see: http://zgsm.westgis.ac.cn/EN/volumn/current.shtml