Urbanization, and the resulting land use/cover change, is a primary cause of the degradation of coastal wetland ecosystems. Reclamation projects are seen as a way to strike a balance between socioeconomic development and maintenance of coastal ecosystems. Our aim was to understand the ecological changes to Jiangsu's coastal wetland resulting from land use change since 1977 by using remote sensing and spatial analyses. The results indicate that: (1) The area of artificial land use expanded while natural land use was reduced, which emphasized an increase in production-orientated land uses at the expense of ecologically important wetlands; (2) It took 34 years for landscape ecological security and 39 years for ecosystem services to regain equilibrium. The coastal reclamation area would recover ecological equilibrium only after a minimum of 30 years; (3) The total ecosystem service value decreased significantly from $2.98 billion per year to $2.31 billion per year from 1977 to 2014. Food production was the only one ecosystem service function that consistently increased, mainly because of government policy; (4) The relationship between landscape ecological security and ecosystem services is complicated, mainly because of the scale effect of landscape ecology. Spatial analysis of changing gravity centers showed that landscape ecological security and ecosystem service quality became better in the north than the south over the study period.
The spatial restructuring of village systems is an important means by which to promote rural revitalization. A large number of villages with small average areas bring great challenges to the implementation of the Rural Revitalization Strategy (RRS) in China. To promote the implementation of the RRS, it is necessary to restructure the village system. This paper proposes a method of spatial restructuring for the village system at the county level, oriented toward the RRS. This study proposes a village classification system with central villages, characteristic villages, and merged villages. It also accounts for the role of various villages in the RRS and proposes differentiated development strategies. This study involved the construction of a village centrality index system and a central village selection model aligned with the RRS. Taking the district of Jintan in Jiangsu Province as a case study for the empirical analysis, the results show that the applicability of the model to the study area is good. Using this model, 32 central villages and 10 characteristic villages were selected. After restructuring the village system, the number of villages decreased by 69.1%. The results from analyzing the travel time radius of the central villages show that 71.5% of the land in the evaluation area lies within a 15 min commute of the central villages, and 96.5% lies within 25 min, indicating that the locations and number of the selected central villages are reasonable. Compared with the service area of the village system before the restructure, the average service area of the central villages is 3.4 times larger, which helps to improve the infrastructure and public service efficiency of the central villages. By guiding resources to aggregate in the central villages and promoting the comprehensive consolidation of land in the merged villages, the restructuring of the village system can help further the success of the RRS in Jintan.
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