Comprehensive Eco-Environmental Effects Caused by Land Use Transition from the Perspective of Production–Living–Ecological Spaces in a Typical Region: A Case Study of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China

Abstract

With the promotion of rapid economic and social development, land use has undergone profound processes of transition worldwide, leaving the production–living–ecological spaces (PLES) and landscape pattern reconfigured, thus further affecting regional eco-environmental quality and landscape ecological risk. This paper first introduces a research framework of comprehensive eco-environmental effects caused by shifts in land use, to analyze the relations and interactions among land use transition, interconversion of PLES, eco-environmental quality, and landscape ecological risk, and then this framework was applied to the empirical analysis of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Guangxi), to examine the comprehensive eco-environmental effects caused by land use transition there. The results show the following: (1) During 1990–2018, ecological space in Guangxi tended to continuously shrink in area, while the area of production and living space kept expanding. The areas of forest ecological land, grass ecological land, and agricultural production land clearly decreased over time, having been mainly converted into both urban living land as well as industrial and mining production land. (2) The eco-environmental quality in Guangxi showed a trend of continual decline, this characterized by high and medium-high quality zones decreasing in area as the low-quality zone expanded. Further, the spatial distribution of eco-environmental quality tended to diminish when moving from Guangxi’s surrounding towards its central and southern parts. (3) However, the landscape ecological risk continued to rise mainly because of reductions in ecological space. Its spatial distribution was the inverse of that of eco-environmental quality; i.e., being at high risk in the central and southern parts, but lower in the surroundings. (4) The bivariate global Moran’s I analysis revealed a significant negative correlation between the eco-environmental quality and landscape ecological risk. Going from remote mountainous and hilly areas to rural areas, and then into urban areas, the eco-environmental quality displayed a gradually decreasing trend, while landscape ecological risk was initially reduced but then augmented. We conclude that land use transition in Guangxi has caused a continuous reduction in its regional eco-environmental quality, and also exacerbated its landscape ecological risk. Hence, it is of great importance to balance the PLES and optimize the landscape pattern, so as to restore the eco-environmental quality while also mitigating the landscape ecological risk of Guangxi and similar regions.

Spatial-temporal changes of landscape ecological risk in the Liuchong river basin from the perspective of production-life-ecological space

“…In this study, we investigated the land use and LER changes in the Liuchong River Basin from the perspective of PLES. We constructed a LER assessment model by referring to existing studies (Yang et al, 2018;Qi, 2020;Chen and Shi, 2021;Chen et al, 2022b;Wang et al, 2022c;Guo and Guo, 2022;Li and Wu, 2022;Liang et al, 2022). Furthermore, by using land use change ecological contribution ratio and spatial autocorrelation analysis, we quantitatively analyzed the LER of the Liuchong River Basin in karst areas.…”

Spatiotemporal Evolution of Production–Living–Ecological Land and Its Eco-Environmental Response in China’s Coastal Zone

“…To understand the status of eco-environmental quality in the whole coastal zone, we categorized the EI values of each year into 5 grades according to the regularity of their natural transitions [13,35,42,48], and the grades from lowest to highest were as follows: low-quality area (EI ≤ 0.16), lower-quality area (0.16 < EI ≤ 0.40), moderate-quality area (0.40 < EI ≤ 0.54), higher-quality area (0.54 < EI ≤ 0.68), and high-quality area (EI > 0.68).…”

“…These two methods can reflect the eco-environmental quality status of different land types and clarify the main land use transformations that cause changes in the overall eco-environmental quality of the region [39][40][41]. Given the broad application of this method in China [42][43][44], this study adopted the EI and the ecological impact rate of PLEL change (EIR) to explore the eco-environmental response to PLEL transformation comprehensively.…”

Evolution characteristics, carbon emission effects and influencing factors of production-living-ecological space in Taihang Mountain poverty belt, China

“…Land use is a hotspot issue facing mankind (Arrow, et al, 1995), and many studies have been carried out on the issue, focusing on land-use transitions (Drummond et al, 2017), land use/cover changes (LUCCs) (Goldewijk, 2001;Winkler et al, 2021), the effects of land use/cover changes on biodiversity (Newbold et al, 2015), ecosystem services (Balthazar et al, 2014), greenhouse gases (de Sousa-Neto et al, 2018), nitrogen (Ojoyi et al, 2017), and the influencing factors of land use change (Weber et al, 2001;Deslatte et al, 2022;Lambin et al, 2011). With the introduction of PLES in China and its gradual evolution into an important theoretical direction land use, many studies have been conducted under the framework of PLES, such as the functional identification and spatial division (Duan et al, 2021;Bai et al, 2022), coupling coordination analysis Cui et al, 2022), spatial conflict (Zhao et al, 2022), and spatial pattern optimization (Tian et al, 2020;Liao et al, 2022).Among them, research on the transition of PLES and ecological effects is currently a very important research aspect, involving research on ecosystem service value (Wang et al, 2022), eco-environment quality (Yang et al, 2018), and study areas covering China (Kong et al, 2021), provinces (Chen et al, 2022), and cities (Jiang et al, 2022). As an economically less developed and ecologically fragile area in China, it is worth studying further whether the transition of the PLES in the mountain poverty belt has unique characteristics.…”