Abstract
Urban agglomerations have gradually formed in different Chinese cities, exerting great pressure on the ecological environment. Ecosystem health is an important index for the evaluation of the sustainable development of cities, but it has rarely been used for urban agglomerations. In this study, the ecosystem health in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River Urban Agglomeration was assessed using the ecosystem vigor, organization, resilience, and services framework at the county scale. A GeoDetector was used to determine the effects of seven factors on ecosystem health. The results show that: (1) The spatial distribution of ecosystem health differs significantly. The ecosystem health in the centers of Wuhan Metropolis, Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan City Group, and Poyang Lake City Group is significantly lower than in surrounding areas. (2) Temporally, well-level research units improve gradually; research units with relatively weak levels remain relatively stable. (3) The land use degree is the main factor affecting ecosystem health, with interactions between the different factors. The effects of these factors on ecosystem health are enhanced or nonlinear; (4) The effect of the proportion of construction land on ecosystem health increases over time. The layout used in urban land use planning significantly affects ecosystem health.
Highlights
With the continuous development of the global population and social economy, cities will become an inevitable product of the development of human society [1]
Based on the VORS framework, an ecosystem health index was constructed for the MRYRUA [15,16]
Referring to the results of previous research, the average ecosystem health of four years at the ordinary level was defined as 0.468–0.483, and ecosystem health was divided into the following five categories: well (0.6–1.0), relatively well (0.5–0.6), ordinary (0.4–0.5), relatively weak (0.3–0.4), and weak (0–0.3). We used these five ecosystem health levels to evaluate the spatiotemporal characteristics of ecosystem health in the MRYRUA
Summary
With the continuous development of the global population and social economy, cities will become an inevitable product of the development of human society [1]. The urbanization rate reached 59.58% in 2018, which means that more than half of the population lived in a city. With the rapid development of human society, various ecological problems have become apparent. National and global ecological and environmental problems, such as energy shortages, water pollution, land degradation, biodiversity loss and the frequent occurrence of extreme weather, have emerged [2,3]. Urban expansion has affected large swathes of cultivated land, forest land and water. Because of the continuous increase in the population, more resources and space are required, which damages the structure and functional stability of ecosystems to varying degrees by exceeding the carrying capacity
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