Ecological Security Pattern Analysis Based on InVEST and Least-Cost Path Model: A Case Study of Dongguan Water Village

Qian Lin,Jiaying Mao,Jiansheng Wu,Jian Yang,Weifeng Li

doi:10.3390/su8020172

Qian Lin, Jiaying Mao + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su8020172

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Abstract

The famous “world’s factory” city, Dongguan, like many other places in China, is a typical beneficiary of China’s Reform and Opening-up Policy. However, rapid urban sprawl and economic growth are at the expense of the destruction of the local environment. Therefore, it is of great importance to establish an ecological security network for sustainable development. InVEST models, effective tools to measure sensitivity and intensity of external threats to quantify habitat value, are used to calculate habitat quality of water and land. By combining structural connectivity and the Least-Cost Path model (LCP model), in which corridors are determined based on the minimum accumulative cost path between each critical point, ecological security patterns were calculated. According to the results, the northwest region of Dongguan, having a large quantity of farmlands and water and therefore many corridors and critical patches, is the most essential area in the overall security of ecological environments, which should be protected first. If developed, it should be dominated by eco-tourism and eco-agriculture. We hope that research on the ecological network, which includes critical patches and corridors formed by greenland and rivers, will lead toward better-informed proposals for local urban planning and regional sustainable development.

Highlights

Human activities are the primary cause of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation [1,2], which increases the pressure to further urban development [3,4]
When we think about the future of economic development, first, we need to adhere to the ecological bottom line, to balance the economic development and ecological protection
In this paper, we need to focus on these two important natural elements to construct ecological security patterns separately for each

Summary

Introduction

Human activities are the primary cause of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation [1,2], which increases the pressure to further urban development [3,4]. In order to avoid causing irreparable ecological damage in the process of urbanization, the topic of ecological security has attracted increasing attention in urban planning [9,10,11,12]. Ecological security tends to focus on two aspects of security: the security of the urban environment and the security of the city’s future development [18]. From the standpoint of ecology, a secure ecosystem should be able to maintain its structure over a certain time scale and be resilient to stress [19,20]

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