Ecological security pattern: A new idea for balancing regional development and ecological protection. A case study of the Jiaodong Peninsula, China

With the rapid development of urbanization, the disorderly expansion of land use for urban construction has led to increasingly severe spatial dislocations of ecological land and construction land, and the topic of rationally planning the scale of urban land use and controlling urban sprawl from the perspective of ecological security has become a challenge for many countries. This paper considers the Jiaodong Peninsula as the study area. The ecological sources were obtained by integrating the results of an ecological importance assessment and the data on nature reserves, a basic ecological resistance surface was built, and ecological corridors and buffers were identified using a minimum cumulative resistance model. Three development scenarios were designed for 2015–2030 based on future land use simulation (FLUS) model, namely, natural development (ND), core ecological patch protection (CEP) and ecological security pattern restriction (ESPR). The ND scenario followed the land expansion rate from 2005 to 2015; the CEP scenario used the ecological sources as a forbidden conversion area, and the ESPR scenario used the ecological security pattern as a forbidden conversion area. A multiscale evaluation system based on the ecological security index (ESI) and the landscape pattern was established to analyze the three scenarios in detail. The main conclusions were as follows: (1) the area of ecological sources of the Jiaodong Peninsula was 3296.85 km2, and 13 ecological corridors were identified, and (2) in the multi-scale ecological security evaluation, the ND scenario destroys the original ecosystem structure of the region, which is not conducive to regional ecological conservation; the CEP scenario still has a trend of landscape fragmentation, and the ESPR scenario performs well in all aspects. Based on the landscape pattern, it was observed that the ESPR scenario had the largest landscape diversity and the most uniform distribution pattern, and the landscape dominance and heterogeneity were both the best. This finding indicated that imposing the ecological security pattern could make it possible to effectively control the spatial form of construction land, avoid excessive dispersion of landscape types, and form a stable and secure ecological pattern. This study can provide an important reference for spatial boundary control of urban development and construction and the formulation of related ecological protection policies.