Impact of road transportation development on habitat quality in economically developed areas: A case study of Jiangsu Province, China

Abstract

The excessive expansion of road transportation often has an impact on the quality of regional habitats. This paper attempts to assess the impact of road transportation on regional habitat quality in economically developed areas. A kernel density analysis was used to characterise the road transportation development in Jiangsu Province from 2000 to 2015. An Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs (InVEST) habitat quality model was applied to assess changes in habitat quality. Furthermore, a fixed-effect regression model was utilised to examine the impact of road transportation development in Jiangsu Province on habitat quality. The analysis indicates that the average kernel density of road transportation in the province increased from 0.109 to 0.551 km/km 2 while the habitat quality decreased from 0.51 to 0.48. The development of road transportationin Jiangsu Province has had a serious negative impact on the quality of the habitat. For every 1-ha increase in land area for road use, the habitat quality index will decrease by 0.066; for every 1 km/km 2 increase in road transportation kernel density, the habitat quality index will decline by 0.121.

Spatiotemporal Differentiation of Territorial Space Development Intensity and Its Habitat Quality Response in Northeast China

“…On the one hand, the development of territorial space promotes the conversion of woodland and grassland into cultivated land and cultivated land into construction land, respectively; thus, a sizeable quota of agricultural land and natural ecological land becomes occupied. On the other hand, territorial space development adds new infrastructure, such as traffic roads, which provides convenience for deep development and breaks the original landscape pattern [36,50]. The evaluation of HQ must consider the following four factors: (1) the relative impact of each threat, (2) the relative sensitivity of each habitat to each threat, (3) the distance between habitats and threat sources, and (4) the degree of legal protection of land [51,52].…”

“…In the research on HQ, most scholars have evaluated HQ and the habitat degradation degree based on the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model for regions, cities, and watersheds [30][31][32][33]. On the basis of HQ evaluation, various scholars have scrutinized the impact of land-use type changes to HQ [34], the HQ response to urban expansion [35], the impact of urbanization on HQ in rapidly urbanized areas [8,33], and the threat of roads to regional HQ [36,37]. HQ has become a representative index for measuring the quality of the regional ecological environment.…”

Spatial Distribution of Construction Waste Recycling Facilities

“…Kernel density analysis is used to study the change in the spatial density of point elements, enabling the location and degree of point elements to be shown more intuitively, (11) and is an important statistical analysis method for extracting features from a geographical spatial distribution. (12) By taking the recycling facilities of construction waste in Beijing as the centers and the search radius as an axis with which to construct a circle, and counting the number of recycling facilities in the circle, a smooth and continuous density distribution map can be generated. Weights, which are proportional to the distance from the point event, are assigned to the surrounding area by the kernel function.…”

Driving Mechanism of Habitat Quality at Different Grid-Scales in a Metropolitan City

“…With the development of electronic information science and technology, the mathematical methods of CA-Markov [12], MAXENT [13], SolVES [14], InVEST [15], and other models can be easily realize the quantitative analysis of the ecological environment at the meso-scale or macroscale. Among them, the InVEST model was tested by many scholars to assess the habitat quality of wetlands, forests, or other specific natural ecosystems because of its easy data acquisition, stronger visualization, higher accuracy, and simple operation [15][16][17][18][19]. However, so far, no systematic reviews exist on the InVEST model for calculating habitat quality in urban ecosystems, especially in metropolitan areas, which needs to be further explored.…”