Integrating Ecosystems and Socioeconomic Systems to Identify Ecological Security Pattern and Restoration Strategy in a Rapidly Urbanizing Landscape

Abstract

The rapid process of urbanization has been accompanied by a disordered expansion of construction land, which has resulted in the degradation of ecosystem services. The identification of ecological security patterns (ESPs) is an important means to coordinating human-land relationships and carrying out ecological restoration strategies, which are of great significance to protecting ecological sustainability. However, previous studies have ignored the mutual impact of urbanization and ecological protection, which leads to the contradiction between them and useless of ESPs. This paper takes a rapidly urbanizing metropolitan area as an example. Ecological sources were identified based on the integration of ecosystem services and socioeconomic indicators by the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) method, which considers the trade-off between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems. The Linkage Mapper tool was used to extract ecological corridors, and thus ecological barrier points and pinch points were identified to implement ecological restoration. ESPs included 158 ecological sources according to the results. In more detail, the ecological sources and corridors were mainly distributed in the area dominated by ecosystem indicators, whereas the central urban area contributed less ecological sources, which indicates that the trade-off between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems has a significant impact on the construction of ESPs. Specifically, 406 ecological corridors were classified into different resistance levels to extract 433.26 km2 barrier points and 458.51 km2 pinch points. The study also proposed primary and secondary ecological restoration strategies for medium-, high- and low-resistance corridors based on the optimization of ESPs, which could not only improve ecosystem quality, but also fulfil the demands of human well-being. The integration of ecosystems and socioeconomic systems improves the existing methods for identifying ecological sources and restoration priority areas, and provides a scientific basis for balancing the development of urbanization and ecological protection in metropolitan regions.