Construction of ecological security networks and the identification of priority areas for ecological restoration in Fujiang River Basin

Hao ChenYingwei WangZhongqi ChengLi Ma^*

• Engineering Research Center of Rural Environmental Protection and Green Low-carbon Development of Sichuan Province, Mianyang Normal University, Mianyang, China

Building a regional ecological security network is an important strategy to enhance ecosystem service functions, and determining priority areas for ecological restoration is the main measure to scientifically and orderly promote the ecological restoration of national land space.The Fujiang River Basin was taken as the study area, while the human footprint and landscape ecological risk model were used to quantitatively evaluate the negative interference of the ecosystem. The importance evaluation results of ecosystem services and the minimum cumulative resistance model were used to construct the ecological security network of the Fujiang River Basin with the ecological source as the "key patch", the ecological corridor as the "axis", and the ecological node as the "hub". The key areas with high negative interference in the ecological network were extracted as the priority areas of ecological restoration and targeted restoration measures were proposed. The results showed that: (1) the importance of ecosystem services in the Fujiang River Basin could be comprehensively analyzed by selecting indicators such as water conservation, soil and water conservation, and habitat quality. The Conefor tool was used to evaluate the landscape connectivity of candidate source patches, where 23 ecological sources were extracted, an ecological source area of 7638.88 km2 was identified, which was clustered in the eastern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and sporadically distributed in the parallel mountains of eastern Sichuan. (2) The ecological corridors in the study area were distributed in the "cobweb" pattern, with a total length of 2249.32 km, and 26 ecological nodes were scattered in the low-resistance area of the corridors. Based on the ecological network of sources and corridors forming networks, habitat connectivity, the ecological construction idea of one corridor and two areas was proposed. (3) Based on the spatial superposition of ecological security networks and negative interference surfaces, the priority areas of ecological restoration in the Fujiang River Basin were identified, and propose corresponding ecological restoration strategies based on its typical characteristics. The above results can provide scientific references for clarifying the ecological security pattern of the research area, improving the ecological service functions and restoration measures of ecologically fragile areas.