Research on Ecosystem Security and Restoration Pattern of Urban Agglomeration in the Yellow River Basin

Abstract

Reasonable identification of the ecosystem security space and pattern restoration for the Yellow River Basin will be significant for facilitating future ecological protection and restoration projects. This study employs ecosystem services and landscape connectivity to discern ecological source areas and conducts an optimization evaluation method of resistance surfaces and the minimum cumulative resistance (MCR) model to identify the ecosystem security pattern of urban agglomeration. Then, restoration measures are proposed. The results indicate that: (1) There are 46 ecological source areas in the ecosystem security patterns of the Lanxi urban agglomeration, with a total area of 8199.249 km2. Moreover, in terms of spatial distribution, ecological source areas are sparse in the east while crowded in the west of the Lanxi urban agglomeration and are mainly composed of natural reserves, forest parks, and farmlands. (2) The ecosystem security patterns contain 914 ecological corridors with a total length of 62,970.181 km, most of which are short-distance corridors, being dense in the part of the northwest with a webbed feature. (3) The study adds 10 ecological source areas to restore the ecosystem security pattern and ecological corridors to improve the rationality of the ecosystem security pattern. Meanwhile, this study proposes restoration measures to protect the ecological environment by defining the levels of ecological security in order to provide a reference for the government to formulate policies and regulations.