Ecological Security Assessment Based on the “Importance–Sensitivity–Connectivity” Index and Pattern Construction: A Case Study of Xiliu Ditch in the Yellow River Basin, China

Abstract

Resource, environmental, and ecological issues have become major constraints to the development of many regions. The Yellow River Basin is an important barrier for maintaining ecological security in northern China, but it has been impacted by problems such as severe soil erosion and declining biodiversity. The rational construction of ecological security patterns is important to enhance ecosystem functions and maintain regional ecological security. In this study, a comprehensive ecological security assessment system was constructed by selecting ecosystem service importance, ecological sensitivity, and landscape connectivity to assess the ecological security of Xiliu Ditch, an ecologically fragile region of the Inner Mongolia section of the Yellow River Basin in China. The assessment results showed significant spatial heterogeneity, with medium- and low-security value areas dominating, while high-security value areas accounted for only 18.7% of the study area. Seventeen ecological sources were identified from the high-security areas, which were mainly composed of grassland, woodland, and water bodies, most of which are distributed in the southern part of the study area. Twenty ecological corridors were selected by the minimum cumulative resistance model and gravity model and classified into 15 construction corridors and 5 potential corridors. Forty-six ecological nodes were defined, including twenty strategic points, nine potential strategic points, and seventeen break points. On this basis, we constructed an ecological security pattern of “two belts, three cores, six zones, multiple corridors and multiple nodes” and proposed corresponding ecological governance measures. This study explores the ecological security pattern at the small watershed scale, which helps to realize the fine management of the Xiliu Ditch basin and, on this basis, can provide scientific support for the ecological protection and sustainable development of the Yellow River basin. In addition, the ecological security assessment system proposed in this study can provide new ideas for the construction of ecological security patterns in similar ecologically fragile areas around the globe.

Optimization strategies of ecological security patterns through importance of ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity—A case study in the Yellow River Basin

“…The results were basically consistent with the study of Zhang et al (2022), but there were differences in quantity and some areas (Figure 7). Thus, the feasibility of the corridors was verified by setting a buffer zone of 1000 m and analyzing the proportion of each ecological land, and the total proportion of cropland, woodland, and grassland was obtained to be 86.3% (Table 4), which indicated that the selected corridors were reasonable under the realistic conditions; the spatial dynamics of ecological nodes and barriers were basically consistent with past studies (Xu, 2023), but the distribution of nodes and barriers in this paper was wider (Figure 9). The differences in the selection of indicator factors as well as data sources were important reasons for the differences in the results.…”

“…In this study, we evaluated and optimized the ESPs of the YRB and compared them with some of the past studies on the YRB, and found that the characteristics of their spatial distribution were basically the same (Wang et al, 2023;Xu, 2023;Zhang et al, 2022Zhang et al, , 2023. The spatial distribution of soil conservation, carbon sequestration, and oxygen release were roughly similar to that of Wang et al (2023), while water conservation differed from its spatial distribution due to differences in data sources and calculation methods (Figure 3); ecological sources were mostly placed in areas with abundant forests and grasses, such as the junction of the upper and middle reaches, the southeast and east, and the cropland, woodland, and grassland constituting the ecological sources occupied 97.6% of its area, which were all in high agreement with the results of Wang et al (2023) (Figure 5); ecological corridors were distributed throughout the basin, and the distribution of sources and the magnitude of resistance affected the distribution characteristics of corridors.…”

Objects detection theory for evaluating the city environmental quality

“…Additionally, some scholars collect dust samples along urban traffic routes, calculate the average concentrations of toxic pollutants such as lead, copper, and chromium, and use the results to evaluate the current urban air quality (Kabir et al, 2022). Some researchers construct comprehensive ecological security assessment systems for ecosystems by considering the importance of ecosystem services, ecological sensitivity, and landscape connectivity (Xu et al, 2023). Remote sensing satellite technology is commonly used to acquire ecological environment data, enabling the detection and analysis of dynamic changes in the ecological environment in urban ecological assessments.…”

Spatio-Temporal Evolution of Key Areas of Territorial Ecological Restoration in Resource-Exhausted Cities: A Case Study of Jiawang District, China

“…The evaluation of ecological sensitivity refers to the diagnosis of potential areas where regional ecosystems may have generated ecological problems and caused ecological degradation under the influence of human activities and natural environment changes [43,69]. This study selected five geologicalgeomorphological factors, namely slope, elevation, NDVI, distance from subsidence area, and distance from residential area [70,71], as well as two hydrological factors, namely distance from waterbodies and soil erosion [40,72], in order to reflect the characteristics of the internal attributes of the resource-exhausted city region and the types of potential risks (Table 2). Landscape stability refers to the intensity of the influence of ecological patches on ecological flow activities, and it is affected by landscape fragmentation and landscape connectivity [60,73].…”

“…Another method is to select high-value ecological areas as ecological source areas by evaluating ecological indicators based on the evaluation of ecological service value and ecological sensitivity [35][36][37][38][39], but this method does not fully consider the integrality and connectivity of patches in the landscape space. Therefore, this study combined the importance of ecosystem services, ecological sensitivity, and landscape stability to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ecological security [40][41][42]. This method pays more attention to the functional attributes of ecosystems, which is conducive to accurately extracting areas with potential environmental problems and provides an effective scientific basis for constructing ESPs [43][44][45].…”