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Arid Land Geography ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (4): 1125-1136.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000-6060.2021.510

• Earth Surface Process • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Spatial and temporal changes in land use and habitat quality in the Weihe River Basin based on the PLUS and InVEST models and predictions

HU Feng1(),ZHANG Yan2,GUO Yu1,ZHANG Panpan1,LYU Shuai1,ZHANG Changchun1()   

  1. 1. Department of Land and Resources, Hebei Agricultural University, Baoding 071000, Heibei, China
    2. Department of Land Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710000, Shaanxi, China
  • Received:2021-10-15 Revised:2022-01-22 Online:2022-07-25 Published:2022-08-11
  • Contact: Changchun ZHANG E-mail:1685286505@qq.com;changchun_zhang@hebau.edu.cn

Abstract:

Habitat quality is an important foundation for human well-being and sustainable development. It is of great significance for regional ecological conservation and sustainable land resource use. Therefore, this paper explores the changes in the spatial patterns of habitat quality in the Weihe River Basin, northwest China from the perspective of land-use change by analyzing three periods of land use data from 2000 to 2020 and coupling the PLUS and InVEST models to predict and evaluate future land use and habitat quality. In our analysis, we found that from 2000 to 2020, the areas of construction land and grassland in the Weihe River Basin increased year by year, the area of forest land rose slightly, and the area of cultivated land continuously decreased. However, we predict that the drastic land-use changes in the Weihe River Basin will decrease significantly and land-use changes will stabilize from 2020 to 2050. In addition, we further explored the spatial distribution and changes in habitat quality in the basin on the basis of the analysis of land-use changes. We found that the overall level of habitat quality in the basin was moderately high from 2000 to 2020, with a clear trend of habitat quality polarization, gradually increasing areas of low and high habitat quality, and gradually decreasing areas of moderate habitat quality. However, the overall level of habitat quality in the basin gradually increased, consistent with the increasing ecological improvement in the Weihe River Basin in recent years. From 2020 to 2050, the overall habitat quality in the basin will continue to increase, but the growth rate will slow down and the intensity of habitat quality changes will decrease. After analyzing land use and habitat quality, we explored the main reasons for their change. We found that regional ecological compensation policies and socioeconomic development were the main reasons for land-use changes. Meanwhile, habitat quality was closely related to the spatial pattern of land use, with higher and more stable habitat quality levels in areas with high concentrations of forested land and low disturbance of human activities, whereas the habitat quality tended to be poorer in plain areas where human activities are more intensive and urban development is more concentrated. However, it is worth acknowledging that the management and restoration of the ecologically fragile areas of the Loess Plateau in the watershed have led to a gradual improvement in habitat management, which is also an important reason for the overall improvement in the habitat quality in the watershed as a whole.

Key words: land use, habitat quality, patch-generating land use simulation model, integrated valuation of ecosystem services and trade-offs model, Weihe River Basin