Abstract
Biocapacity of a region exhibits spatial differences owing to the limitations of regional scale and natural conditions. Based on the multi-scale perspective, we comprehensively studied and analyzed the temporal and spatial differences of the biocapacity of a region in an attempt to establish the groundwork for optimizing urban development and its utilization framework. By adopting the ecological footprint model along with multi-scale difference evaluation method, the municipal and county scales are incorporated into a unified analysis framework in this paper, thereby facilitating the exploration of the temporal and spatial differences in the biocapacity of Shenyang—a city in China—from 2005 to 2019. The results demonstrated that: 1) At the municipal scale, the biocapacity per capita fluctuated between 1.35 hm2/person and 2.22 hm2/person. It revealed an “up-down-up” trend, which appeared consistent with the Kuznets cycle; at the county scale, the biocapacity depicted spatial differences, while those of downtown and surrounding districts/counties developed a two-level ascending hierarchical structure. 2) The time series of footprint size and depth first ascended and then declined, and can be classified into four types: closed type, inverted U-type, S-type, and M-type. Among them, S-type and M-type have the phenomenon of over-utilizing the stock capital. 3) For a long time, the regional difference of biocapacity has mostly dwelt on two scales with an evident scale effect, and the biocapacity of Liaozhong District was the worst.
Highlights
Since the reform and opening-up campaign in China, the urbanization process has witnessed rapid advancement
A comprehensive understanding of the temporal and spatial differentiation characteristics of urban biocapacity is instrumental for enhancing the quality of urban development, development coordination, and pattern protection. Against this background with Shenyang as an example, we review the temporal and spatial differentiation characteristics of urban biocapacity at the municipal and county scale level in this paper by adopting the ecological footprint temporal and spatial difference model and multi-scale difference evaluation method
EF is the total amount of regional ecological footprint; N is the population of the region; ef represents the ecological footprint per capita; Ai refers to the bioproductive land area per capita converted for the consumption item i; ci is the consumption per capita of item i; pi depicts the average production capacity of consumption item i; and rj is the equilibrium factor
Summary
Since the reform and opening-up campaign in China, the urbanization process has witnessed rapid advancement. It is imperative to systemize and optimize the relationship between urban construction and the natural system [1,2] In this context, the concept of biocapacity was proposed and has been gradually evolving in the field of urban planning as an imperative index for evaluating the regulation capacity, maintenance capacity, and the support capacity of the urban-natural. Owing to the distinctive regional characteristics of the natural resource distribution in China, the economic and social development as well as the natural resource utilization efficiency tends to vary in different regions. Exploring the temporal and spatial differentiation characteristics of urban biocapacity appertaining to the regional resource endowment can be highly conducive for promoting urban high-quality development, sustainable construction, as well as sustainable utilization of the available resources
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