What Are the Correlations between Human Disturbance, the Spatial Pattern of the Urban Landscape, and Eco-Environmental Quality?
Weiliang Wang, Xinran Li, Haijing Lv, Yu Tian
Abstract
Human transformation of the landscape is reflected in its composition and spatial pattern. Therefore, exploring the response of the eco-environment to the composition and spatial pattern of the landscape is beneficial to providing a theoretical basis for urban planners. In this study, we take a typical oil city in China as an example and introduce the hemeroby index, landscape metrics, and a remote sensing-based ecological index (RSEI) to calculate and evaluate the urban landscape pattern, human disturbance, and eco-environmental quality, as well as exploring the relationships between them. The results demonstrate that the mean RSEI value of the study area was 0.4866, indicating that its eco-environmental quality was relatively moderate. The whole study area had a relatively high degree of human disturbance (hemeroby index = 7.4498), where the effect of human disturbance on the eco-environment was more intense in natural ecosystems, such as forest and grasslands, but less intense in artificial landscapes, such as built-up areas and farmlands. The urban landscape pattern was significantly correlated with eco-environmental quality, among which the proportion of green space and impervious surface had the strongest correlations with the mean RSEI, with correlation coefficients of 0.538 and −0.577, respectively. In addition, the correlation between the landscape pattern and the RSEI presented obvious spatial heterogeneity.