Ecological restoration zoning of territorial space in China: An ecosystem health perspective.

Rapid urbanization and high-intensity socio-economic activities in China have caused severe ecological problems. Implementing ecological restoration in China has become an inevitable way to restore the ecosystem. Ecosystem health is crucial for evaluating ecological conditions and trends, but comprehensive national studies that use quantitative ecosystem health assessments to guide specific ecological restoration are lacking. This study constructs the Vigor-Organization-Resilience-Services (VORS) model to evaluate the ecosystem health level of China during 2000-2020. Then, through the natural breakpoint and intelligent clustering correction, we carried out the ecological restoration zoning and proposed corresponding measures. The results show that China's overall ecosystem health declined from 2000 to 2020, and ecological restoration is imminent. The spatial pattern of ecosystem health is generally favorable in the south and usually poor in the north. China protects poor ecosystems' health well but needs more for better ones. To combat this degradation, we propose a zoning strategy that classifies the landscape into five categories: Ecosystem Conservation Areas (3.47%), focusing on biodiversity preservation; Ecosystem Enhancement Areas (10.53%), aiming at increasing ecological resilience; Ecosystem Buffer Zones (23.04%), intending to mitigate human impacts; Ecosystem Correction Zones (33.79%), targeting at restoring degraded ecosystems; and Ecosystem Reshaping Zones (29.17%), designing to revitalize ecological functions. The ecological restoration zoning in China proposed in this study, combined with appropriate and practical restoration tools, will help mitigate ecological problems and improve stability and ecosystem health.

Spatial relationship between land urbanization and ecosystem health in the Yangtze River Basin, China.

Globally, land-based urbanization had far-reaching impacts on ecosystem health. Determining the spatial relationship between land urbanization and ecosystem health is important for sustainable socioeconomic development and ecological protection. However, existing studies lack research on these relationships in basin regions, which may limit the implementation of effective basin ecological management measures. Based on multi-source data, this study analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns and spatial correlations of land urbanization rate (LUR) and ecosystem health index (EHI) in the Yangtze River basin (YRB) with a series of spatial analysis methods. The results showed that EHI in the YRB decreased by 0.024 during 2000-2020, with a decreasing range of 3.133 %, while LUR increased by 0.216, with an increasing range of 54.135 %. LUR has a significant negative spatial correlation with EHI, with high EHI and high LUR (9.814% in 2020) and high EHI and low LUR (12.397% in 2020) being the main types of agglomeration. The global regression results showed that LUR significantly negatively affected EHI. At the local scale, the LUR positively affected the EHI in the mountainous region, while the opposite was confirmed in the plain region. This study can provide scientific reference for the development of sustainable urban land control measures and basin ecological management measures.