Abstract
The unprecedented regional urbanization has brought great pressure on the ecological environment. Building an ecological security pattern and guide regional land and space development is an important technique to ensure regional ecological security and stability to achieve sustainable development. In this study, the Pingtan Island of China and the Durban city of South Africa were chosen as case study area for a comparative study of different scales. The importance of ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity were evaluated, respectively. The core area of landscape which is vital for ecological function maintenance was extracted by morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) and landscape connectivity analysis. Furthermore, the ecological sources were determined by combining the results of ecological protection redline delimitation and core area landscape extraction. The potential ecological corridors were identified based on the minimum cumulative resistance model, and the ecological security pattern of study areas was constructed. The results showed that the ecological protection redline areas of Pingtan and Durban were 42.78 km2 and 389.07 km2, respectively, which were mainly distributed in mountainous areas with good habitat quality. Pingtan ecological security pattern is composed of 15 ecological sources, 16 ecological corridors, 10 stepping stone patches and 15 ecological obstacle points. The total length of corridors is 112.23 km, which is radially distributed in the form of “one ring, three belts”. The ecological security pattern of Durban is composed of 15 ecological sources, 17 ecological corridors, 11 stepping stone patches and 18 ecological obstacle points. The total length of corridors is 274.25 km, which is radially distributed in the form of “two rings and three belts”. The research results can provide an important reference for the land space construction planning and ecological restoration projects in Pingtan and Durban.
Highlights
The combined impact of urbanization, the rapid growth of population and land use dramatic changes led to ecological problems including forest and grass degradation, loss of biodiversity and aggravation of soil erosion
The grid data from morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) analysis was converted into vector data, and the patches in the core area were extracted, and the landscape connectivity was evaluated by Conefor 2.6 (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.)
Ai and a j represent the area of patch i and patch j, respectively; n represents the total number of regional patches; Pij∗ is the maximum probability of species directly spreading between patch i and patch j; A L is the total land area of study areas
Summary
The combined impact of urbanization, the rapid growth of population and land use dramatic changes led to ecological problems including forest and grass degradation, loss of biodiversity and aggravation of soil erosion. The direct identification method is to directly identify the important ecological land such as nature reserves, scenic spots and forest parks in the regional planning as the ecological sources [10]. Some scholars have introduced the ecological protection redline and morphological analysis method into the study of ecological security patterns It provided new reference and research ideas for the extraction of ecological sources. As an important innovation of the ecological protection system, the ecological protection redline delimits the ecological control area with the bottom line thinking [14] It can ensure the stability of regional ecosystem function, maintain the pattern of ecological security. Based on the evaluation of ecosystem service function importance and ecological sensitivity, GIS spatial analysis technology is used to delimit the ecological protection redline. Ecological security pattern of Pingtan and Durban, and provide the reference for the construction of regional ecological security pattern
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