Integrating Ecosystems and Socioeconomic Systems to Identify Ecological Security Pattern and Restoration Strategy in a Rapidly Urbanizing Landscape

Abstract

The rapid process of urbanization has been accompanied by a disordered expansion of construction land, which has resulted in the degradation of ecosystem services. The identification of ecological security patterns (ESPs) is an important means to coordinating human-land relationships and carrying out ecological restoration strategies, which are of great significance to protecting ecological sustainability. However, previous studies have ignored the mutual impact of urbanization and ecological protection, which leads to the contradiction between them and useless of ESPs. This paper takes a rapidly urbanizing metropolitan area as an example. Ecological sources were identified based on the integration of ecosystem services and socioeconomic indicators by the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) method, which considers the trade-off between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems. The Linkage Mapper tool was used to extract ecological corridors, and thus ecological barrier points and pinch points were identified to implement ecological restoration. ESPs included 158 ecological sources according to the results. In more detail, the ecological sources and corridors were mainly distributed in the area dominated by ecosystem indicators, whereas the central urban area contributed less ecological sources, which indicates that the trade-off between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems has a significant impact on the construction of ESPs. Specifically, 406 ecological corridors were classified into different resistance levels to extract 433.26 km2 barrier points and 458.51 km2 pinch points. The study also proposed primary and secondary ecological restoration strategies for medium-, high- and low-resistance corridors based on the optimization of ESPs, which could not only improve ecosystem quality, but also fulfil the demands of human well-being. The integration of ecosystems and socioeconomic systems improves the existing methods for identifying ecological sources and restoration priority areas, and provides a scientific basis for balancing the development of urbanization and ecological protection in metropolitan regions.

Assessment of spatial-temporal balance of carbon sequestration ecosystem service supply and demand by landscape composition: A case study of Guiyang City, China

“…Numerous studies have demonstrated that one of the key contributing factors to the decline in ecosystem services was the process of rapid urbanization, which was accompanied by the sprawl of construction land (Tan et al, 2022;Tiando et al, 2021). Despite having a high construction intensity in this study, Huaxi District had the highest supply and the largest area of carbon sequestration due to its abundance of natural green space.…”

Integrating ecosystem services and complex network theory to construct and optimize ecological security patterns: a case study of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, China

“…The ACO-based GeoSOS area optimization model ) has been widely applied in land use optimization and nature reserve siting studies (Mi et al 2015Liu et al 2011, which can identify ecological sources with a more compact pattern (Liu et al 2012). In addition, the current ES-based ecological source identification ignores the differences in the importance of various ES during the regional development process (Tan, Li and Lin 2022Dai, Liu and Luo 2021Lin et al 2017. Simply assigning the same weights to ESs may lead to biased results (Ramel et al 2020), missing high-functioning ecological sources or identifying unnecessary areas.…”