Ecological security pattern-based simulation for land use structure change: a case study in Ezhou City, China

The ecological environment quality is an important constraint and an optimization objective for land resource allocation. Integrating ecological service value（ESV） accounting and ecological security pattern（ESP） delineation, and combining with the land use structure of 2004/2010/2016 in Ezhou City, this research laid out the urban ESP based on ESV with Net Primary Productivity（NPP）, and made it as the main influence factor to simulate land use structure in 2022. The results indicated that: 1) The water body has the biggest contribution to ESV, while the construction land has the minimum; 2) 91 ecological corridors are extracted, of which 28 were important ecological corridors; there were36 ecological nodes extracted, including 17 important nodes; 3) According to ESV, Ezhou City was divided into four security zones. The area of ecological restoration zone was the largest, and human activity core zone area was the smallest; 4) In the no ESP protection scenarios and ESP protection scenarios separately, the net increase area of construction land is from 868.5 hm2 to 52.74 hm2 in the ecological core protection area; the construction land in the human activity core area has been increased by 2342.31 hm2 in protected scene, 766.23 hm2 more than that of the unprotected scene. The results show that the division of security zones promoted the relocation of construction land from ecological protection core zone to human activity core zone, which can protect the ecological environment effectively, and the ESP-based simulation can provide the decision-making reference to coordinate the relationship of regional land resource allocation and the ecological environment protection.