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Spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of ecosystem health and the synergetic impact of its driving factors in the Yangtze River Delta, China

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Abstract

In recent years, . the rapid development of the Yangtze River Delta in China has led to increasingly serious regional eco-environmental problems. Therefore, it is of great significance for the construction of ecological civilization to study the ecosystem health in the Yangtze River Delta. In this paper, the assessment framework of “Vigor-Organization-Resilience” was used to assess the ecosystem health index (EHI) of the Yangtze River Delta from 2000 to 2020, and then the spatial autocorrelation method was used to analyze the agglomeration of EHI in 314 counties in this region. Finally, the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model and the SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) model were combined to explore the synergistic impact of EHI driving factors. The results show that (1) from 2000 to 2020, the EHI in the Yangtze River Delta is at the level of ordinary health, and gradually decreased; (2) the EHI has significant spatial positive correlation and aggregation; (3) the driving factors in descending order of importance are urbanization level (UL), precipitation (PRE), PM2.5 (PM), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and temperature (TEMP); and (4) the relationship between UL and EHI is logarithmic; PRE and EHI are quartic polynomial; PM, NDVI, TEMP, and EHI are quadratic polynomial. The results of this paper are of great significance to the management and restoration of the ecosystem in this region

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This research is funded by the National Key R&D Program of China, 2022YFB3903000, 2022YFB3903005, and Li Zhengqiang Expert Workstation of Yunnan Province (202205AF150031).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanhu Laboratory, Research Center of Big Data Technology, Jiaxing, 314000, China

    Xuepeng Zhang, Peng Gou, Yingshuang Huang, Tianyu Zhou, Yang Liu & Wei Nie

  2. College of Geoscience and Surveying Engineering, China University of Mining & Technology, Beijing, 100083, China

    Wei Chen & Guangchao Li

Authors
  1. Xuepeng Zhang
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  2. Peng Gou
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  3. Wei Chen
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  4. Guangchao Li
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  5. Yingshuang Huang
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  6. Tianyu Zhou
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  7. Yang Liu
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  8. Wei Nie
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Contributions

Xuepeng Zhang: methodology, analysis writing, data sources. Peng Gou: methodology, coding. Wei Chen: coding, investigation. Guangchao Li: validation, investigation, coding. Yingshuang Huang: meteorological data. Tianyu Zhou: meteorological data. Yang Liu: investigation. Wei Nie: validation.

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Correspondence to Xuepeng Zhang.

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Zhang, X., Gou, P., Chen, W. et al. Spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of ecosystem health and the synergetic impact of its driving factors in the Yangtze River Delta, China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 85184–85197 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-28412-0

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