Abstract
The rapid urbanization process, accompanied by the transformation of high-intensive land development and land use, constantly encroaches on habitat patches, making them increasingly fragmented and isolated, which directly influences the regional landscape pattern and sustainable development. Taking the Tomur World Natural Heritage region as the study area, the morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) method and landscape index method were used to extract the ecological source areas of great significance to the construction of ecological corridors. Then, using the minimum cumulative resistance model (MCR), the comprehensive resistance surface was constructed and the potential corridors were generated by the minimum cost path method. Finally, according to the gravity model, the important corridors of the study area were designed. Results showed that the MSPA method and MCR model can be used in combination to identify the potential ecological corridors in the study area and clarify the priority of landscape element protection in the study area, which can provide guidance to construct the ecological network and provide reference for other regions as well.
Highlights
The rapid urbanization process, accompanied by the transformation of high-intensive land development and land use, constantly encroaches on habitat patches, making them increasingly fragmented and isolated, which directly influences the regional landscape pattern and sustainable development
The MCR model, which is based on GIS technology, can calculate the cost incurred by species from ecological sources of different landscape and land use types to simulate the path of least cumulative resistance, so as to build an ecological corridor
After the classification of land use, woodland, grassland, and waters are extracted to be the foreground, and artificial land and other land as the background, a series of image processing methods are used to divide the foreground into seven non-overlapping categories (Table 1), and categories that are important for maintaining connectivity are identified, which increases the scientific nature of the ecological source and ecological corridor selection [36,37]
Summary
The rapid urbanization process, accompanied by the transformation of high-intensive land development and land use, constantly encroaches on habitat patches, making them increasingly fragmented and isolated, which directly influences the regional landscape pattern and sustainable development. The MCR model, which is based on GIS technology, can calculate the cost incurred by species from ecological sources of different landscape and land use types to simulate the path of least cumulative resistance, so as to build an ecological corridor. To date, it has been widely used in relevant research fields. In the current relevant studies, the selection of an ecological source is somewhat subjective and ignores the connectivity role of patches in the landscape [12,13]
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