Assessment of Spatial Temporal Changes of Ecological Environment Quality: A Case Study in Huaibei City, China

Abstract

Under the short-term economic development goal, the excessive exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of the ecological environment make the ecological environment of Huaibei cities increasingly fragile. This study constructed the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) to evaluate the ecological environment change trend and its driving factors in Huaibei City from 2000 to 2020. The barycenter migration model was used to determine the RSEI spatial change trend, and the geographic detector was used to analyze the influencing factors of the RSEI value change. The results showed that: (1) the average RSEI value of Huaibei City generally fluctuates within the range of good and excellent grades. (2) The migration direction of the barycenter of RSEI is similar when the level of RSEI improves or decreases from 2000 to 2020, and the barycenter migration is most severe from 2005 to 2015. (3) The driving factors of RSEI change were population density (0.47) > land use (0.24) > slope (0.14) > precipitation (0.08) > temperature (0.04) > altitude (0.03). All the factors had interaction effects on the RSEI, mainly with nonlinear enhancement. (4) From 2000 to 2010, urban construction encroached on all kinds of land, which was the direct reason for the decline in ecological environment quality. From 2010 to 2020, the surge of water and meadow areas improved the ecological environment quality of Huaibei city. Therefore, reducing the expansion of artificial land, returning farmland to forests and meadows, wetland park construction, and other ecological protection measures are the keys to ensuring the sustainable development of regional social and economic development. This study can provide a reference and scientific basis for sustainable development strategy and ecological protection planning to improve the ecological environment quality of Huaibei City.

A regional assessment of ecological environment quality in Thailand special economic zone: Spatial heterogeneous influences and future prediction

“…We also endeavor to include socioeconomic factors in the analyzes to obtain a diversely representative set of factors. Population density is a widely adopted variable to reveal the contributions of social aspects to EEQ because urbanization is always associated with population growth and adverse impacts on environment (Cui et al, 2022; Geng et al, 2022).…”

Evaluation of Urban Ecological Environment Quality Based on Google Earth Engine: A Case Study in Xi’an, China

“…Precipitation and temperature significantly affect the vegetation growth in the region, which directly leads to differences in NDVi values and further affects the measured RSEI [54]. The spatial differentiation of land use types directly influences the supply of ecosystem services and the expansion of human built-up areas and the construction of roads can significantly affect the regional ecological environment [55]. Accordingly, urban areas with various levels of development have different GDP and population densities, which also affect the spatial differentiation of RSEI [56].…”

Impact of Land Use/Land Cover Change on Ecological Quality during Urbanization in the Lower Yellow River Basin: A Case Study of Jinan City

“…With the development of remote sensing theory and application in recent years, many remote sensing parameters or indexes have been applied to ecological quality evaluation, such as net primary productivity (NPP), the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), land surface temperature (LST) [4,19,20], etc. However, ecological quality is the result of the combined effect of regional pressure-state-response (PSR) frameworks.…”

“…The proposal of RSEI has extended the application of remote sensing in the assessment of the ecological status of the land surface [25]. Furthermore, RSEI has been widely used in recent years for rapid ecological quality evaluation on different scales, such as national and provincial regions [26][27][28], urban agglomerations [2,29,30], cities [11,19,31], drainage basins [6,32,33], lakes [3,34], islands [35,36], mining areas [37], protected areas [38], etc. In addition, many scholars have also used RSEI to analyze the relationship between changes in ecological quality and factors, such as urbanization [31], economic and industrial development [39], land consolidation [40], population and impervious surfaces [28,41], ecosystem services [12], natural climate change [42], landscape [43] and geological hazards [44], revealing the drivers of ecological quality change.…”

“…In addition, many scholars have also used RSEI to analyze the relationship between changes in ecological quality and factors, such as urbanization [31], economic and industrial development [39], land consolidation [40], population and impervious surfaces [28,41], ecosystem services [12], natural climate change [42], landscape [43] and geological hazards [44], revealing the drivers of ecological quality change. Many studies have shown that land use and ecological composition are the main factors influencing the changes in ecological quality [3,19,25]. In particular, the regional land use/land cover (LULC) structure has an important influence on the stability of the ecosystem structure and function [22] and dominates changes in ecological quality [2,24].…”