Combining habitat area and fragmentation change for ecological disturbance assessment in Jiangsu Province, China
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Combining habitat area and fragmentation change for ecological disturbance assessment in Jiangsu Province, China Zhifeng Jin 1,2 & Jing Wang 1,3 & Xuesong Kong 1,3 Received: 13 January 2020 / Accepted: 5 March 2020 / Published online: 4 April 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Understanding where and how human land use causes ecological consequences is essential for habitat conservation. However, the assessment of the ecological disturbance caused by human land use is usually shaped by the area change in ecological land. The comprehensive evaluation of ecological disturbance based on the losses and gains of ecological patches is neglected. This paper analyzed the land use change between agricultural land, construction land, and ecological land from 1995 to 2015 in Jiangsu Province of eastern China. The ecological disturbance was quantificationally evaluated by a proposed index that considered both the changes of habitat area and fragmentation caused by the losses and gains of ecological landscape patches. The findings showed that there was a slight increase in area of ecological land in Jiangsu Province; however, ecological fragmentation was becoming severe with the growth of human land use, which, in turn, resulted in increased ecological disturbance. The losses and gains in the area and fragmentation of ecological land were comprehensively reflected using the proposed ecological disturbance index. Negative ecological disturbance was more likely to be observed at the edge of the city centers, ecologically sensitive areas, and counties with low area ratios of ecological land. Ecological governance policies should be formulated and implemented based on quantity, quality, and spatial relationships between human land use and ecological disturbance. Keywords Land use . Urban expansion . Ecological fragmentation . Habitat loss . Patch level . County level
Introduction Human land use is a major cause of the loss of ecosystem services (Foley et al. 2005; Song et al. 2018). Globally,
Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Jing Wang [email protected] * Xuesong Kong [email protected] Zhifeng Jin [email protected] 1
School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
2
Jiangsu Research Center of Land Resource, 58 Shuiximen Road, Nanjing 210017, China
3
Key Laboratory of Geographic Information System, Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
large-scale nature-dominated land with important ecosystem services has been occupied by human settlements (Seto et al. 2012) and agricultural land (Laurance et al. 2014), which influence ecosystem functions by decreasing habitat area and altering ecological landscape patterns (Dadashpoor et al. 2019). As a result, ecological deterioration and biodiversity losses are becoming more serious (Powers and Jetz 2019). The ecological issues caused by land use change have raised extensive concerns (Turyansky et al. 2018). Great efforts to address
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