Construction of the Ecological Security Pattern in Xishuangbanna Tropical Rainforest Based on Circuit Theory

Abstract

Urban modernization and economic globalization have led to significant changes in traditional natural landscapes. The unregulated and large-scale expansion of rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna has resulted in water and scenic forests being replaced by rubber forests and the complex rainforest ecosystem being replaced by simple artificial forests. This has resulted in increasingly prominent ecological problems such as soil erosion, regional microclimate changes, and sharp declines in biodiversity. The ecological security pattern is an important way to protect regional ecological sustainability. Taking the tropical rainforest in Xishuangbanna as an example, this study identified ecological sources through the evaluation of the importance of ecosystem services, constructed resistance surfaces through ecological sensitivity evaluation, and used circuit theory to simulate ecological processes in heterogeneous landscapes by calculating “electricity” or “resistance”, thereby identifying ecological corridors and key ecological nodes. The results identified 31 ecological source areas, 65 key ecological corridors, 7 potential ecological corridors, 37 ecological pinch points, and 99 ecological barriers. The overall distribution of ecological sources was scattered, with higher density in the northwest and southeast regions. Ecological corridors were distributed along high mountains, and both ecological sources and corridors were mainly composed of forest land. Based on circuit theory, this study filled the gap in the MCR model’s inability to identify the true width of corridors due to ignoring the randomness of biological migration. It determined the spatial range of ecological corridors and the specific locations of ecological nodes and barriers, providing a reference for solving ecological problems in Xishuangbanna, such as “rainforest fragmentation”.