Abstract
Rapid urbanization has led to the continuous degradation of natural ecological space within large urban agglomerations, triggering landscape fragmentation and habitat loss, which poses a great threat to regional ecological sustainability. Ecological networks (ENs) are a comprehensive control scheme to protect regional ecological sustainability. However, in the current research about ENs, most studies can only determine the orientation of ecological corridors but not their specific spatial range. This leads to the fact that ENs can only be abstract concepts composed of points and lines, and cannot be implemented into concrete spatial planning. In this study, taking the Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration as an example, ecological sources were identified by morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) and habitat quality assessment, ecological resistance surfaces were constructed based on habitat risk assessment (HRA). And circuit theory was used to simulate the ecosystem processes in heterogeneous landscapes via by calculating the cumulative current value and cumulative current recovery value, to identify the spatial range and key areas of ecological corridors. The results showed that the ENs includes 6,263.73 km2 of ecological sources, 12,136.61 km2 of ecological corridors, 283.61 km2 of pinch points and 347.51 km2 of barriers. Specifically, ecological sources were distributed in a spatial pattern of five groups, and ecological corridors were short and dense within groups, long in distance and narrow in width between groups. The pinch points and barriers mainly exist in the ecological corridors connecting the inner and outer parts of the central city and in the inter-group corridors. In order to ensure the connectivity and effectiveness of ENs, it is necessary to focus on the pinch points and barriers and include them in the priority areas for protection and restoration. Based on MSPA and circuit theory, this study provides a new method for determining the spatial range of ENs and the specific locations of priority areas, and provides a feasible solution for the concrete implementation of ENs to achieve effective ecological protection and restoration.
Highlights
In recent decades, with the acceleration of global environmental change and urbanization, land cover and related surface processes have undergone significant changes (Deng et al, 2009; Kong et al, 2017)
The ecological sources of the Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration were obtained by extracting the habitat quality high value areas in the core areas
We identified ecological sources based on morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) analysis and habitat quality assessment, constructed ecological resistance surfaces based on habitat risk and nighttime light data, and identified ecological corridors based on circuit theory
Summary
With the acceleration of global environmental change and urbanization, land cover and related surface processes have undergone significant changes (Deng et al, 2009; Kong et al, 2017). ENs is essentially a spatial regulation scheme that coordinates natural ecosystems with socio-economic systems (Liang et al, 2018; D’Aloia et al, 2019; De Montis et al, 2019) It identifies the most important areas by comparing the importance of different landscape patches to ecological processes and ecological functions, and constructs a network system that can maintain the integrity of regional ecosystems and the continuity of ecological processes (Isaac et al, 2018; Cunha and Magalhães, 2019; Huang X. et al, 2021; Tang et al, 2021). Similar concepts include ecological infrastructure (EI) (Marchant, 2014; Sigwela et al, 2017), green infrastructure (GI) (Weber et al, 2006; Liquete et al, 2015; Coppola et al, 2019; Afionis et al, 2020), ecological security pattern (ESP) (Peng et al, 2018a, 2019; Huang et al, 2019; Wang and Pan, 2019)
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