Response of Ecosystem Health to Land Use Changes and Landscape Patterns in the Karst Mountainous Regions of Southwest China.

Yixin Li,Zhijie Wang,Yuan Su,Yan Liu

doi:10.3390/ijerph19063273

Yixin Li, Zhijie Wang + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19063273

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Abstract

The quantitative assessment of ecosystem health is important for interpreting the ecological effects of land use changes and formulating effective measures of sustainable ecological development by policymakers. This study investigated the response of ecosystem health to land use changes and landscape patterns in the karst mountainous regions of southwest China by taking Guiyang City as a case study area and assessing the spatial and temporal changes in ecosystem health from 2008 to 2017 using the vigor–organization–resilience model; it analyzed the influence of land use changes and landscape patterns on ecosystem health using spatial overlay analysis, the Dunnett’s T3 test, and the Spearman correlation analysis. The results show that the land use structure dramatically changed, with a trend of a sharp decrement of farmland and rapid increment of forestland and construction land due to rapid urbanization and ecologization. The overall ecosystem health was at a relatively strong level, with the average value greater than 0.6. The deterioration of ecosystem health was attributed to the expansion of construction land and farmland and the degradation of forestland, while the increment of forestland was the major contributor to the improvement of ecosystem health. The ecosystem health of the forestland + farmland landscape was significantly superior to that of forestland + construction land and construction land + farmland landscapes. Moreover, each landscape configurations had a significant positive or negative correlation with the ecosystem health. This study provides a valuable reference for formulating sustainable environmental management strategies in karst mountainous regions in China.

Highlights

Natural ecosystems provide both the material basis and ecological services for human survival and development, and a healthy ecosystem is a fundamental guarantee of sustainable social and economic development [1–3]
Ecosystem health is the purpose and basis of environmental management, and the core of comprehensive ecosystem evaluation; increasing attention has been paid to assessing ecosystem health and the impact of human activities on ecological health in recent decades [7–11]
Farmland anduse forestland were the main usechanged types, with accounting for Farmland and forestland were the main land use types, with their area accounting for more than 86% of the total area

Summary

Introduction

Natural ecosystems provide both the material basis and ecological services for human survival and development, and a healthy ecosystem is a fundamental guarantee of sustainable social and economic development [1–3]. Due to the expanded breadth and intensity of human activities, rapid urbanization and industrialization have led to unprecedented changes to the global ecosystem, resulting in the degradation of the ecosystem and its services, which poses a serious threat to the survival and sustainable development of human society [1,4–6]. The concept of ecological health was first proposed in [12], which enriched the study of ecosystems and has gained wide acceptance among scientists [2,13]. Scholars have since supplemented and improved the concept of ecosystem health [4,10,13–16].

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