Ecological remediation zoning of territory based on the “Source-Stream-Sink” Coupler: Case study of Liuzhou city, China

Abstract

Rapidly increasing demand for land and natural resources has produced problems of man-land contradiction and ecological destruction, threatening the ecosystem’s healthy development. Traditional research was often carried out in multiple departments, mainly in ecological remediation projects that have not been inspected by the whole organization system. The master plan formulated by the government department was severely disconnected from the project of local units. No quantitative models have been established to clarify the complex nonlinear relationships between projects, so our cognition of monomer’s ecological remediation and the overall pattern are fuzzy. Coupling ecological source and overall pattern allows us to coordinate the relationship between them and enables us to explore the most efficient ecological remediation solutions. We created the “Source-Stream-Sink” Coupler (SSSC) using ecological security patterns to simulate ecological source and the overall pattern coupling and to explore the integration of the two. SSSC simulates the whole process of land ecological remediation pattern construction. It includes three sub-steps: (1) identifying the “Source” of nature; (2) finding “Stream” act on connections; (3) plotting “Sink” with agglomeration effects. We chose Liuzhou city as a case study research area, verifying SSSC can smoothly operate the whole process from ecological source recognition to pattern construction by conducting field research and data embedding. This allows us to identify an optimal ecological remediation zoning of territory pattern.