Human activities such as deforestation and urbanization have affected the regional habitat quality of the Poyang Lake area. To evaluate the evolution of habitat quality and its influencing factors in the area, we used Classification and Regression Trees (CART) to interpret the land-use status and used the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) model to analyze the characteristics of changes in habitat quality in the Poyang Lake Eco-Economic Zone (PLEEZ) from 1988 to 2018. The results show that, from 1988 to 2018, land use in the PLEEZ underwent significant changes. The changes in land use led to a gradual increase in habitat degradation and a gradual decrease in habitat quality in the study area. Rapid urbanization notably decreased the habitat quality in the study area. However, at the same time, the ecological protection projects such as returning farmland to forests slowed the decline in habitat quality. Driven by these two factors, habitat quality in the PLEEZ gradually declined but the rate of its decline was suppressed. The findings of this study are of great significance for the coordinated development of social, economic, and ecological development in the PLEEZ and similar areas.

Rapid global urbanization has caused substantial changes in land cover and vegetation growth. Rapid urban growth in a short time has escalated the conflicts between economic development and ecological conservation, particularly in some metropolitan regions. However, the effects of rapid urbanization on vegetation have not been fully captured, especially accounting for the latest ecological development initiatives. In this study, we chose a typical urban agglomeration, the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) urban agglomeration in China, and analyzed the vegetation variation and the impacts of urbanization on the vegetation growth based on transferable methods, using data such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the nighttime light (NTL). The results indicate significantly enhanced vegetation growth in the BTH region, with a strikingly spatial pattern of greening in the northwest, and browning in the southeast from 2001 to 2018. Besides this, the results enclose most of the areas (72%) of built-up land in the BTH, which tended to brown in the process of rapid urban development, while 27% greened with increasing urbanization. This means that the vegetation’s response to urbanization shows apparent differences and geographic heterogeneity along the urbanization gradient at the urban agglomeration scale. Parts of the periphery of the metropolis and the central areas of developing cities may experience a browning trend; however, the core urban areas of urbanized metropolises demonstrate greening, rather than browning. Furthermore, this study provides solid evidence on the remarkable greening impacts of several ecological restoration projects which are currently underway, especially in ecologically fragile areas (e.g., the suburbs). The implications derived from the urban ecological development and the transferable methodology deployed in this paper facilitate the unfolding relationships between urbanization and social-ecological development. Our findings provide new insights into the interactions between vegetation dynamics and urbanization at the regional level.