Spatial and Temporal Variations of Habitat Quality and Its Response of Landscape Dynamic in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

Abstract

Habitat quality is an important indicator for assessing biodiversity and is critical to ecosystem processes. With urban development and construction in developing countries, habitat quality is increasingly influenced by landscape pattern changes. This has made habitat conservation to be an increasingly urgent issue. Despite the growing interest in this issue, studies that reveal the role of land use change in habitat degradation at multiple scales are still lacking. Therefore, we analyzed the spatial and temporal variations of habitat quality of the Three Gorges Reservoir area by the InVEST habitat quality model and demonstrated the responses of habitat quality to various landscape dynamics by correspondence analysis. The result showed that the habitat quality score of this area increased from 0.685 in 2000 to 0.739 in 2015 and presented a significant spatial heterogeneity. Habitat quality was significantly higher in the northeastern and southwestern parts of the reservoir area than in other regions. Meanwhile, habitat quality improved with altitude and slope, and increased for all altitude and slope zones. The habitat quality of >1000 m and >25° zone exceeds 0.8, while the habitat quality of <500 m and <15° zone is less than 0.6. Habitat quality significantly varied among landscape dynamics and was extremely sensitive to vegetation recovery and urban expansion. The vegetation restoration model of returning farmland to forest is difficult to sustain, so we suggest changing the vegetation recovery model to constructing complex vegetation community. This study helps us to better understand the effects of landscape pattern changes on habitat quality and can provide a scientific basis for formulating regional ecological conservation policies and sustainable use of land resources.

Multi-Scenario Simulation of Land Use and Habitat Quality in the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration, China

“…According to the current situation of the study area and relevant studies, cultivated land, construction land, national roads, provincial roads, and main railways were chosen as the threat sources. In addition, referring to the user manual of the investment model [ 15 ] and existing relevant studies [ 60 , 61 ], we assigned values to the threat factors and habitat sensitivity ( Table 3 and Table 4 ).…”

“…According to the current situation of the study area and relevant studies, cultivated land, construction land, national roads, provincial roads, and main railways were chosen as the threat sources. In addition, referring to the user manual of the investment model [15] and existing relevant studies [60,61], we assigned values to the threat factors and habitat sensitivity (Tables 3 and 4). In 2000, the most common land-use type of the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration was cultivated land at 46.28% of the total area, followed by woodland, grassland, and construction land at 21.48%, 26.82%, and 4.07%, respectively.…”

Territorial Pattern Evolution and Its Comprehensive Carrying Capacity Evaluation in the Coastal Area of Beibu Gulf, China

“…Hierarchical Clustering Analysis is a technique used to find the underlying structure or clustering tendency of objects through an iterative process that associates (agglomerative methods) or dissociates (divisive methods) the objects based on the information contained in the fingerprint matrix [ 26 , 27 ]. In this paper, the hierarchical agglomerative clustering method was used to cluster the future land use of different counties according to the similarity of the objects.…”

“…Compared to other clustering methods, the agglomerative methods provide structured clustering with valuable information on the levels of similarity and relative distance between clusters [ 28 ]. Additionally, the Euclidean distance was used to calculate the similarity value between the territorial pattern of each county, which was used as a criterion to construct the clustering tree [ 26 ].…”

Potential impact of land‐use change on habitat quality in the distribution range of crocodile lizards in China

“…Understanding the spatiotemporal variability of habitat quality is important for expanding ecological conservation of wildlife (e.g., protect genetic diversity, predict population dynamics) (Crawford & Nusha, 2018 ; Thornton et al, 2013 ). In general, habitat quality varies with the intensity of nearby land use (Liu et al, 2022 ). Land use types, intensities and patterns alter the condition of natural resources and thus affect the survival and reproduction of wildlife (Dai et al, 2019 ; Whittington et al, 2019 ).…”