Abstract: Ecological compensation is the current hot issue of ecological economics research. Based on the brief description of the relationship between watershed ecosystem services and ecological compensation, this paper analyzes the reference of watershed environmental benefits of the ecological compensation standard, just transform of the opportunity cost into environmental benefits. Taking ecological restoration goals in the Shiyanghe River Basin as an example to carry out empirical analysis, in considering the compensation of the total budget constraints, we compare the effect of two different compensation standards for ecological compensation mechanism. The result shows that using the environmental benefits instead of the opportunity cost as the compensation standards has obvious effort in improving the enthusiasm of farmer participation in ecological and binding of the act of protecting ecosystem service. The introduction of the priorities compensation indicator that identified by the ratio of opportunity cost and environmental benefits has significant promotion effort to achieve ecological restoration goals at an alternative mechanisms which has ecological compensation capital budget constraint.

Key words: priority payment, opportunity cost, environmental benefits, alternative payment scheme, Shiyanghe River