The seeds of ecological recovery in urbanization – Spatiotemporal evolution of ecological resiliency of Dianchi Lake Basin, China

As a result of years of monitoring the ecological resiliency of natural areas and cities, it has become clear that it is both important and often feasible to implement ecological and environmental restoration in conjunction with ongoing processes of landscape change development and urbanization. Ecological resiliency and spatiotemporal evolution studies can objectively reveal the resiliency of ecosystems to external disturbances. Ecological monitoring and assessment can also help planners understand regional ecological spatial differentiation patterns and provided data support for planning. In this paper we have analyzes quantitatively the interrelationships of ecological factors in Dianchi Lake Basin (DLB) over the past 30 years and explored the spatial and temporal dynamics of ecological resiliency. Based on remote sensing images and primary data in 1995, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2018, and 2022, we used the center of gravity migration and kernel density analysis to explore the spatial and temporal changes of ecological resiliency. We built the overall resiliency evaluation system using entropy weight in the TOPSIS model, and finally simulate the future changes based on CA-Markov (CA-MC) model. The results show that from 1995 to 2022, the ecological resiliency of land use and vegetation cover in DLB decreased substantially. An important finding was that the ecological resiliency of riparian buffer zone and landscape pattern were generally increasing. The distribution of barycenter movement and kernel density of different levels of ecological resiliency differed significantly and showed fluctuating changes. The extreme low resiliency and extremely resilient areas shift to the northeast, the mildly resilient areas shift to the northwest, and the highly resilient areas shift to the southeast. The overall resiliency level of DLB is predicted to slowly increase from 2022 to 2030 by deduction of the CA-MC model. Our analysis suggests that the study of the evolution of regional ecological resiliency can provide a timely understanding of regional ecological evolution patterns and propose ecological protection strategies.