Evaluation of Ecological Carrying Capacity and Identification of Its Influencing Factors Based on Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System: A Case Study of the Yellow River Basin in Shaanxi

Abstract

Ecological carrying capacity (ECC), which requires simple scientific evaluation methods, is an important evaluation index for assessing the sustainability of ecosystems. We integrate an innovative research method. Geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) were used to evaluate the ECC of the Yellow River Basin in Shaanxi (YRBS) and to identify the underlying factors that influence it. A calculation method that combines RS and GIS data to estimate ECC based on net primary productivity (NPP) was established. The Carnegie–Ames–Stanford approach model was applied to estimate NPP. The NPP of each land type was used as an indicator to determine the yield factors. The ECC of the watershed was calculated with the carrying capacities of each land-use type. The geographical detector model was used to study the influencing factors of ECC, which provides a scientific basis for the formulation of ecological management policies in YRBS. The results show that from 2000 to 2010, it first decreased by 45.46%, and then increased by 37.06% in 2020, an overall decrease of 13.49 × 105 wha in 20 years. Precipitation is the dominant factor that affects ECC, while the impact of human activities on ECC was significantly enhanced during the study period. The developed method based on RS data serves as a reference for ecological evaluation in other similar regions.

Evaluation of ecological carrying capacity and construction of ecological security pattern in West Liaohe River Basin of China

“…From the perspective of temporal heterogeneity, the distribution patterns of ECC from 2000 to 2020 were approximately the same, however, the ECC level of the whole basin showed a fluctuating increasing trend. Human activities are believed to exert an important role in the evolution process of ECC (Ma et al, 2017;Wu and Hu, 2020;Zhu et al, 2022). The changes in ECC are closely related to a series of ecological restoration programs that continuously promoted in the WLRB.…”

“…The research of ECC has experienced the expansion from single factor carrying capacity in the early stage to multi-level and multi-factor including resources, environment, society and economy. The common evaluation methods for ECC include human net primary productivity estimation method (Sjafrie et al, 2018), ecological footprint (S ́wiader et al, 2020), state space method (Tang et al, 2016), system model method (Fang et al, 2021), and spatial evaluation method (Zhu et al, 2022). Among them, the spatial evaluation method is to apply remote sensing (RS) and geographic information systems (GIS) technologies to realize the quantification and spatial visualization of regional ECC, which has become the main trend of current research.…”

Agricultural Land Suitability Assessment Based on GIS at the County Scale in Yibin, China

“…In contrast, the single crop evaluation mode concentrates on the degree of synergy between a specific crop and agricultural land. In the terms of study area, administrative boundaries encompass multiple levels: countries [14], provinces [15,16], cities [8,9], and regions containing natural watersheds [7,11], alluvial plains [17], basins [18], and agricultural industrial parks [19]. the methods applied to ALSA use mainly include Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) method [11,20] and Delphi method [21][22][23] used in indicator selection.…”

Assessing the Sustainability Impacts of the Xiaolangdi Dam: Land Use and Socioeconomic Change in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yellow River Basin

“…At present, remote sensing imaging has the advantage of providing large spatial scale and long time scale monitoring [7]. It provides a large amount of digital land use and ecological change information, so high-resolution satellite remote sensing images are widely used in land use, ecological environment investigations and dynamic monitoring research [8]. The process of land use change has a significant influence on ecosystem services and ecological landscape patterns [9][10][11].…”