Integrating Ecosystems and Socioeconomic Systems to Identify Ecological Security Pattern and Restoration Strategy in a Rapidly Urbanizing Landscape

Jieqi Tan,Hui Li,Wei Lin

doi:10.3389/fenvs.2022.862310

Abstract

The rapid process of urbanization has been accompanied by a disordered expansion of construction land, which has resulted in the degradation of ecosystem services. The identification of ecological security patterns (ESPs) is an important means to coordinating human-land relationships and carrying out ecological restoration strategies, which are of great significance to protecting ecological sustainability. However, previous studies have ignored the mutual impact of urbanization and ecological protection, which leads to the contradiction between them and useless of ESPs. This paper takes a rapidly urbanizing metropolitan area as an example. Ecological sources were identified based on the integration of ecosystem services and socioeconomic indicators by the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) method, which considers the trade-off between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems. The Linkage Mapper tool was used to extract ecological corridors, and thus ecological barrier points and pinch points were identified to implement ecological restoration. ESPs included 158 ecological sources according to the results. In more detail, the ecological sources and corridors were mainly distributed in the area dominated by ecosystem indicators, whereas the central urban area contributed less ecological sources, which indicates that the trade-off between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems has a significant impact on the construction of ESPs. Specifically, 406 ecological corridors were classified into different resistance levels to extract 433.26 km2 barrier points and 458.51 km2 pinch points. The study also proposed primary and secondary ecological restoration strategies for medium-, high- and low-resistance corridors based on the optimization of ESPs, which could not only improve ecosystem quality, but also fulfil the demands of human well-being. The integration of ecosystems and socioeconomic systems improves the existing methods for identifying ecological sources and restoration priority areas, and provides a scientific basis for balancing the development of urbanization and ecological protection in metropolitan regions.

Highlights

Along with the continuous urbanization of recent decades, disorderly expansion of urban construction land and significant loss of ecological land have restricted the sustainability of urban development (Feist et al, 2017; Peng et al, 2018; Zhai and Huang, 2022)
The high values of Habitat Quality (HQ) and Soil Conservation (SC) were located in the northern area and river around the southern area, and would be rich in biodiversity and high soil retention
Previous studies have identified ecological security patterns based on multiple ecosystem services, traditional methods only identified what were considered “ecological patches” as the suppliers, and lacked integration between ecosystems and the socioeconomic systems

Summary

Introduction

Along with the continuous urbanization of recent decades, disorderly expansion of urban construction land and significant loss of ecological land have restricted the sustainability of urban development (Feist et al, 2017; Peng et al, 2018; Zhai and Huang, 2022). Within a coupled human and natural system, the quantity and quality of the ecosystem services are impacted by anthropogenic disturbances, which affects regional landscape patterns and ecological security (Peng et al, 2017b). The construction of ecological security patterns (ESPs) was proposed to develop a method for improving ecological security. The ESPs, an interconnected ecological network composed of different ecosystems, is an effective approach to support biological species, maintain natural ecological processes and promote ecosystem services, as well as to achieve regional ecological sustainability (Su et al, 2016; Peng et al, 2018; Fu et al, 2020).The concept of ESPs was derived from landscape ecological planning in the 1990s (Yu, 1996). Many scholars have studied ESPs on different scales from the perspective of landscape ecology and urban planning (Peng et al, 2017b; Peng et al, 2018)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion