Provincial-Scale Research on the Eco-Security Structure in the Form of an Ecological Network of the Upper Yellow River: A Case Study of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region

Abstract

Important for promoting the integrated protection and systematic management of mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands, and sandy areas, ecological networks form the backbone of the regional ecological security pattern. An improved morphological spatial pattern analysis coupled with a minimum cumulative resistance model (MSPA–MCR) based on multi-source data was used to study, on a provincial scale, the ecological security pattern of Ningxia, an ecologically fragile region in the upper reaches of the Yellow River in China. The results show the following: (1) A reasonable classification of ecological sources and ecological corridors is key to constructing hierarchical ecological networks. Classifying ecological sources by replacing patch areas with energy factors and identifying the importance of ecological corridors by modifying the gravity model with the energy factors proposed in this paper could improve the rationality of the hierarchical structure division of ecological networks. (2) Grassland as the substrate vegetation type is an important ecological source type in arid and semi-arid ecologically fragile areas, and forests and lake wetlands are the main ecological source types in mountainous areas and oasis areas, respectively. The study area was located in the arid–semi-arid transitional area, with a variety of ecological types, such as mountain, oasis, and desert. Therefore, the complex ecological source types of forest–grassland–wetland appear in some areas. (3) There are 45 ecological patch groups that can be classified as ecological sources in Ningxia, including 10 primary source groups. The number of primary source groups is small, and their spatial distribution is unbalanced. There are two categories of ecological corridors, the river corridor and the mountain corridor, and the network connectivity is poor. (4) The ecological network structure of Ningxia is presented as an ecological security structure consisting of one belt, three screens, three corridors, and five clusters, forming a hierarchical nested ecological network security structure system.