Assessment of the urban habitat quality service functions and their drivers based on the fusion module of graph attention network and residual network

ABSTRACTLand use/cover change is a major cause of ecological degradation. Reliable LUCC data are essential for evaluating habitat quality. The current method of surface cover classification based on the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is usually a local spatial operation using a regular convolutional kernel, which ignores the correlation between adjacent image elements. This paper proposes a combination network with two branches, branch 1 uses the K-nearest neighbor clustering algorithm to construct superpixels and then uses the data transformation module to construct a graph attention network (GAT); branch 2 constructs the CNN using attention and residual modules to obtain the spatial and higher-order semantic information of the images. Finally, the features are fused using weighted fusion, and a classification map with less point noise and greater consistency with the real surface coverage is obtained. The classification results of this network are better than those of the other competitive methods. In addition, the urbanization of Sanya has resulted in significant habitat degradation. A good fit ([Formula: see text] in 2020 = 0.639) between habitat quality (HQ) and natural and socioeconomic factors was observed in Sanya. Natural factors are more relevant to HQ than socioeconomic factors and vary spatially.