Assessment of habitat suitability in the Upper Reaches of the Min River in China

Habitat richness influences and even determines biological diversity. Plant habitat suitability assessment can provide technical guidance and information support for ecological restoration. Thirteen factors in three categories of terrain, meteorology and soil were chosen to build a habitat suitability assessment index framework in the Upper Reaches of the Min River, based on the local natural environment and the actual influencing factors of vegetative growth. Combined with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and entropy method, which were used to calculate weights of indexes, habitat suitability was studied by using a multi-objective linear weighting model and geographic information systems (GIS) spatial analysis techniques. The assessment results are as follows: Altitude, soil stability, aspect and slope have more important effects on plant habitat suitability in the Upper Reaches of the Min River, and their weights are 0.311, 0.260, 0.198 and 0.125, respectively. Suitable and sub-suitable habitats cover 4431.80 km2 and 6171.12 km2, respectively; most of which are distributed along both sides of rivers and have higher suitability. Unsuitable habitats cover the largest area (6679.76 km2), accounting for 29.83% of the whole area; and the worst unsuitable habitats are 5107.23 km2 (22.81%); they account for more than half of the study area. These results indicate that the plant habitat in the Upper Reaches of the Min River is poor and ecological restoration is both urgent and difficult. Therefore, based on the principle of taking measures suitable to the habitat in ecological restoration projects, ecological and engineering measures should be combined to have better effects, while increasing the strength of ecological protection.