Evaluating the impact of urban expansion on the habitat quality and constructing ecological security patterns: A case study of Jiziwan in the Yellow River Basin, China

Rapid urbanization has tremendously changed the urban ecological spaces and function of regional habitats, threatening regional ecological security and landscape sustainability. Understanding the impact of urban expansion on habitat quality is significant to ecological security. However, research on habitat quality and ecological security patterns in arid desert regions is limited. Given the research gap, this study constructed and optimized the ecological security pattern of Jiziwan (which refers to areas similar to the shape of the Chinese character “几”) in the Yellow River Basin. To achieve the aim, high habitat quality areas obtained from the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model were used as “sources”, and ecological corridors were identified from the Minimal Cumulative Resistance (MCR) model. Simultaneously, this study integrated land use, natural, social, and economic factors to monitor and assess the impact of urban expansion on habitat quality in Jiziwan. The results showed that: (1) urban expansion and ecological land have become more fragmented in Jiziwan and the urban expansion has changed from the edge-expansion type to the outlying type; (2) from 2000 to 2020, the urban expansion rate increased from 25.95% to 97.58%, which was negatively correlated with the rate of change in good habitat quality; (3) we finally identified 45 important ecological corridors, 140 secondary ecological corridors, and 44 ecological nodes that form an ecological spatial pattern of “two barriers, three corridors, and seven zones”. Our analytical framework offers a valuable tool for constructing ecological security patterns in Jiziwan and selecting “sources” at the regional scale. It can be applied to other landscapes and geographical contexts for sustainable development in arid regions.