Abstract
Since the 1950s, human activities have been driving economic development and land changes, hindering the conservation of biological habitats and landscape connectivity. Constructing ecological networks is an effective means to avoid habitat destruction and fragmentation. Mountain areas are hotspots of biological habitats and biodiversity; however, the pace of urbanization in mountain areas is also accelerating. To protect an ecosystem more effectively, it is necessary to identify ecological corridors and ecological networks. Therefore, based on the Minimal Cumulative Resistance model and taking Chongqing in China as an example, the identification of potential ecological corridors and the construction of an ecological network in Chongqing were realized using the Linkage Mapper software. The results were as follows: (1) From 2005 to 2015, the patch area of cultivated land and grassland in Chongqing decreased by 0.08% and 1.46%, respectively, while that of built-up areas increased by 1.5%. The fragmentation degree of cultivated land was higher, and the internal connectivity of forestry areas was worse. (2) In total, 24 ecological sources were selected, and 87 potential ecological corridors and 35 ecological nodes were generated using the Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis and the Conefor2.6 software. The total length of the ecological network in Chongqing is 2524.34 km, with an average corridor length of 29.02 km. (3) The overall complexity and network efficiency are high, but the spatial distribution of ecological corridors is uneven, especially in the southwest of Chongqing.
Highlights
The global scale of cities continues to grow [1,2], with an expanding scope of human activities [3], putting the global biodiversity at risk of further degradation [4,5]. considerable efforts have been made by governments around the world to protect biodiversity [6,7,8,9,10], the coordination of economic development and biodiversity conservation is still challenging [11,12]
Considerable efforts have been made by governments around the world to protect biodiversity [6,7,8,9,10], the coordination of economic development and biodiversity conservation is still challenging [11,12]
Based on the actual situation in Chongqing, we comprehensively considered the influencing factors of land use types, elevation, slope, roads, and rivers and determined the resistance value of various landscape patches in Chongqing (Table 1), based on relevant studies [25,37]
Summary
The global scale of cities continues to grow [1,2], with an expanding scope of human activities [3], putting the global biodiversity at risk of further degradation [4,5]. Considering the resistance factors, the MCR (Minimal Cumulative Resistance) model is widely used in ecological corridor identification and ecological network construction [36]. It has been used by Yang et al [26] to identify the ecological corridor of Wuhan City, China, with the aim to construct an ecological network of urban agglomeration. Mountain areas account for 70% of the country’s terrestrial area [44], and ecosystem protection in mountain areas plays an important role for ecosystem protection in China [45] In this context, this paper takes Chongqing, China’s “Mountain City”, as the research.
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