Ecological land rent is the excess profit produced by resource scarcity, and is also an important indicator to measure the social-economic effects of ecological resources utilization. Using ecological land rent to satisfy ecological compensation, the social producers of all industries obtain average profits after paying for ecosystem services, while the ecological environment is protected. Through combining ecological land rent allocation and regulation with taxes, property, fees and pricing, as well as distributed benefit-sharing rights and environmental protection duties to different economic bodies, we examined different ecological compensation schemes including ecological tax, ecological land rent sharing, payment of beneficiaries, and price increases. Although these four ecological compensation schemes represent different ecological protection strategies, the quantity of ecological compensation equal to total ecological land rent is the same. And in each scheme, the regulation means, compensation forms and scopes of application are also different. Specifically, ecological tax is easy to operate and reflects government obligations regarding ecological protection; the beneficiaries payment scheme is hard to operate and identify the scope of beneficiaries but can solve the externality problem of nature resource utilization; market measures applied to price increases and reflects the demand and supply of nature resource; and ecological land rent sharing encourages all resource users to protect the ecological environment. Using ecological resources utilization and economic output data in China, the effects of ecological compensation schemes were simulated with quantitative models and theoretical analysis. The result shows that, under the conditions of an 8.6% ecological tax rate, or government and communities sharing 13.4% of total ecological land rent, or beneficiaries paid 5916 yuan a^-1 person^-1, or an average product price increase of 23.8%, the ecological resources consumption and economic output was maintained in the range of bio-capacity. However, when the parameters of ecological compensation, i.e. the ecological tax rate, share of beneficiaries, rate for payments for environmental services and price variance, exhibited the same percentage change, the ecological resources consumption and economic output had different variation. In addition, the different responsible bodies and regulation means of ecological compensation schemes resulted in different effects on interest distribution, technology innovation, production enthusiasm and other aspects. For example, compensation scheme such as ecological tax and ecological land rent sharing had significant impact on interest distribution and technology innovation, while payment of beneficiaries and price increases had significant impact on consumer welfare and daily life costs. Thus, the effect of ecological tax was different from price increases because taxes are governmental measures and the excess profit was reallocated but price increases are related to market forces and the producers had the excess profit. In ecological compensation practice it is therefore necessary to make comprehensive decisions about relevant schemes according to local conditions of population and economic growth, society development, production technology, resource demand and supply, even enterprises' pursuit to profit maximization. The spatial differentiation of ecological compensation schemes also need to be considered. In other words, undifferentiated schemes will not achieve the goal of environmental protection.