Abstract
The agro-pastoral ecotone, an ecological transition zone connecting adjacent areas of agricultural planting area and grassland animal husbandry, has three features: a complex natural condition, relatively pronounced population pressure, and a fragile ecological environment. In this study, we conducted an ecosystem risk assessment in the western part of Jilin Province, China, based on multiscale and multitemporal remote sensing images and land-use data. Furthermore, we focused on land-use change from 1995 to 2015 by applying the dynamic change information survey method and carrying out a transfer track analysis. The results revealed three main findings. (1) The ecological risk index at the scale of 3 km × 3 km harbors significant spatial correlation. (2) The ecological risk index of unutilized land, forest land, and grassland is relatively high for each, and their anti-interference ability is weak, while the ecological risk index of construction land and water area is the lowest. (3) Human interference, e.g., construction activities and cultivated land occupation, is the leading factor driving the exacerbation of ecological risk and frequent land-use type conversions. At the study period’s end, a trend of slight contraction in the high-risk areas was found, indicating that land-use regulation and land protection policies have had significantly positive impact upon the lands’ ecological value. The overall study identified a reasonable research scale for eco-environmental risk assessment and discerned relationships between regional land-use changes through geospatial analysis. Moreover, our findings can help provide practical case study information applicable to similar regions with agro-pastoral ecotones.
Highlights
Over the past 20 years, China’s rapid urbanization has caused many complex social and economic problems, such as a population explosion, the expansion of built-up areas, and ecological issues [1,2,3]
Taking the region of western Jilin Province as a case example, this paper proposes an ecological risk assessment model based on multiscale and multitemporal remote sensing imagery. e dynamic changes and transition relationships of different land-use categories were studied by using a comprehensive measurement method. is study had three objectives
Multiscale Ecological Risk Assessment and Analysis. e ecological risk index (ERI) values at different scales for each risk unit in Western Jilin Province were calculated in ArcGIS according to the above-defined calculation formulae
Summary
Over the past 20 years, China’s rapid urbanization has caused many complex social and economic problems, such as a population explosion, the expansion of built-up areas, and ecological issues [1,2,3]. Interference from human activities places more pressure on natural habitats, directly affecting the structure and function of natural ecosystems, which causes complex ecological security problems, such as environmental pollution, land degradation, and biodiversity decline. Quantitative measurements of land-use landscape patterning and land-use change are of paramount significance for better understanding both regional land evolution and ecological security. Landscape ecological risk assessment can provide potential insight on how to ameliorate the unreasonable use of land resources, by coupling the perspectives of geography and ecology. This type of assessment takes a regional landscape as the study object to quantitatively evaluate the complex ecological effects generated by land-use change
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