Construction of ecological security pattern and land-space restoration zoning based on ecological protection red line

An environmental strategy has been initiated, called “ecological protection red lines”, in China. The population, resources and environment can be balanced to promote the economic, social and ecological benefits. The ecological restoration zoning of national land space can be implemented to improve the habitat quality, the regional ecological security and the sustainable development. It is very necessary to identify the ecological source areas with the ecological protection red line as the initial scope, in order to build a scientific and reliable ecological security network. The “production -living-ecological” space can be classified into the land-space ecological restoration zoning. Therefore, taking Sanming City of Fujian Province as the research area, this study aims to construct a more scientific and effective technical paradigm of land-space ecological restoration zoning. Firstly, the importance of ecological protection was assessed to verify the boundaries of prohibited development zones and protected areas, according to the importance of ecosystem services and ecological vulnerability. Then the ecological source areas were identified to delimit the ecological protection red line. Secondly, the resistance factors were considered to construct the evaluation system of expanding resistance for the ecological source land. And the minimum cumulative resistance model was used to evaluate the ecological corridors and nodes. The ecological fracture points were then extracted to construct a scientific and reliable pattern of ecological security. Finally, the land-space ecological restoration zoning was carried out, according to the ecological security level and the scope of “production-living-ecological” space. Then the targeted countermeasures were proposed for the ecological restoration and protection. The research results showed that: (1) There were 34 ecological sources with an area of 2 185.44 km², accounting for about 9.5% of the national territorial area of the City. These ecological sources were evenly distributed in the surrounding hills and mountains around the central basin, which were mainly concentrated in the North of City. (2) 12 important ecological corridors and 70 general ecological corridors were identified to extract 30 important ecological nodes and 47 general ecological nodes, together with 66 ecological breaking points. There were the full pattern and high level of ecological security in general. However, the corridors in the southern region were sparse with the dense ecological breaking points and low network connectivity. (3) The grade of ecological security was divided to superimpose the scope of “production-living-ecological” space. 12 types of ecological restoration areas were divided into four categories, including the core key zone (16.6%), monitoring and early warning zone (25.06%), buffer transitional zone (35.29%), and conservation protective zone (23.06%). The ecological protection was proposed for the different restoration zones. As such, the regional ecological security was achieved in the high-quality development of cities in the southern hilly areas. Ecological restoration planning can be expected to effectively construct in the technical paradigm of ecological restoration zoning of land space, The finding can provide the technical reference for the decision-making on the land space and ecological protection in the hilly areas of South China.