Abstract
Rapid urbanization and natural hazards are posing threats to local ecological processes and ecosystem services worldwide. Using land use, socioeconomic, and natural hazards data, we conducted an assessment of the ecological vulnerability of prefectures in Sichuan Province for the years 2005, 2010, and 2015 to capture variations in its capacity to modulate in response to disturbances and to explore potential factors driving these variations. We selected five landscape metrics and two topological indicators for the proposed ecological vulnerability index (EVI), and constructed the EVI using a principal component analysis-based entropy method. A series of correlation analyses were subsequently performed to identify the factors driving variations in ecological vulnerability. The results show that: (1) for each of the study years, prefectures with high ecological vulnerability were located mainly in southern and eastern Sichuan, whereas prefectures in central and western Sichuan were of relatively low ecological vulnerability; (2) Sichuan’s ecological vulnerability increased significantly (p = 0.011) during 2005–2010; (3) anthropogenic activities were the main factors driving variations in ecological vulnerability. These findings provide a scientific basis for implementing ecological protection and restoration in Sichuan as well as guidelines for achieving integrated disaster risk reduction.
Highlights
The concept of vulnerability has been applied widely in fields such as disaster studies (Yang et al 2015; Li et al 2016; Armaset al. 2017), sustainable development (Turner et al 2003), urban growth (Hong et al 2016), and climate science (Cinner et al 2013)
The result is coherent with a few previous studies (Li and Fan 2014; Liou et al 2017), which concluded that anthropogenic activities intensified the eco-environmental vulnerability
Of the four socioeconomic indicators, highway mileage and the number of industrial enterprises above the designated size (IEADS), reflecting the intensity of human construction activities, are significantly correlated with the ecological vulnerability index (EVI) (Fig. 4a, b)
Summary
The concept of vulnerability has been applied widely in fields such as disaster studies (Yang et al 2015; Li et al 2016; Armaset al. 2017), sustainable development (Turner et al 2003), urban growth (Hong et al 2016), and climate science (Cinner et al 2013). The concept of vulnerability has been applied widely in fields such as disaster studies Ecological vulnerability is generally conceptualized as the potential of an ecosystem to modulate its response to external interference and stressors at a specific spatial scale (Williams and Kapustka 2000; Qiu et al 2015; Beroya-Eitner 2016). Research into ecological vulnerability has become an important aspect of study on sustainable development (Lin and Ho 2003). Ecological vulnerability assessment can be conducted at different hierarchical scales (De Lange et al 2010), including population level (De Lange et al 2009), community/habitat level (Ocana et al 2019), ecosystem level (Ippolito et al 2010), and landscape level (Ding et al 2018). A comprehensive indicator framework has been widely applied to evaluate ecological vulnerability at landscape level (Song et al 2010; Zhang et al 2014; Kumar et al 2015), which is composed by two major parts
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