Spatiotemporal Characteristics and Prediction of Ecological Safety in the Yellow River Basin of China

Abstract

The Yellow River basin (YRB) is a major ecological functional area in China, and its ecological safety development and change have extremely significant impacts on the natural environment and human society. However, existing studies on the YRB lack spatiotemporal characteristics analysis and prediction of ecological safety with vegetation as the core. Therefore, this study proposes to construct an ecological safety index (ESI) of the YRB based on the comprehensive multidimensional ecological safety evaluation system “vigor-pressure-state-response,” using the normalized difference vegetation index, vegetation carbon sink indicator parameters, temperature, precipitation, the digital elevation model, population density, and the per capita gross domestic product from 2000 to 2020. The spatiotemporal characteristics of the ESI were then analyzed for the YRB, and a long-term and short-term memory network model was constructed to predict the ESI trend of the YRB over the next 10 years. According to the results, from 2000 to 2020, the ESI of the YRB showed a fluctuating upward trend, and the annual average of the ESI changed abruptly in 2015 due to drastic changes in hazardous areas. The ESI in most areas of the YRB showed a significant upward trend, the stability of ESI changes was weak in some areas, and the overall spatial distribution showed significant positive spatial agglomeration characteristics. Further, the response of ESI to landscape complexity in different reaches of the YRB varied. Most of the middle reaches were positively correlated with landscape complexity, while most of the upper and lower reaches were not significantly or negatively correlated. Notably, over the next 10 years, YRB's ESI growth will slow down, with areas with degradation increasing, areas with significant growth decreasing, and areas currently showing stability improvement.

Keywords

• Ecological safety
• evaluation system
• landscape indices
• long-term and short-term memory network (LSTM)
• Yellow River basin (YRB)