Integrating improved ecosystem status assessment and ecosystem management urgency to identify important zones for ecological protection and restoration

•Potential EPR zones are delineated according to EQB generated from various ecosystem site types.•EMU supports to further extracted EPR zones from potential EPR zones.•Integrating ES supply–demand to evaluate EMU enables EPR advantages to benefit human directly.•Pre-intervention in ecosystem to avert risk can be realized by important EPR zoning of future multi paths. The implementation of ecological protection and restoration (EPR) aims to provide the corresponding ecosystem services (ESs) for the region’s long-term development. Ecosystem status, usually evaluated by ecosystem quality, is an important foundation for delineating EPR zones. However, previous assessment methods fail to consider the effects of site conditions on ecosystem status. Furthermore, if limited resources are allocated to areas where ecosystem management is less urgent, the overall efficiency of the process will be compromised. To fill this gap, we developed a new framework that integrated improved ecosystem status assessment and ecosystem management urgency (EMU) to identify important EPR zones. To begin, the study area was divided into several ecosystem site type based on the site-condition factors, such as soil, climate, and others. Ecological quality then was assessed by parameters from remote sensing, including leaf area index, fractional vegetation cover, etc., which supported the identification of potential EPR zones based on a more accurate assessment of ecosystem status. Secondly, the EMU was determined by assessing the risk of ES supply–demand in the future under various development paths of the study area, potential EPR zones with great EMU are the EPR zones. Finally, the importance levels for EPR were divided by ecosystem quality to improve the practicability of EPR projects, and the important EPR zones are those where we should focus our efforts. The new framework was implemented in Hunan Province, a representative province in China of marked contradiction between economic development and ecosystem protection. The findings show that there is a 58.7 % disparity in the spatial distribution of potential EPR zones, depending on whether the impacts of site conditions on ecosystem status are taken into account or not; and given the EMU, the extent of important EPR zones under natural growth path (NGP) and economic development path (EDP) account for 0.43 % (902.15 km2) and 0.56 % (1195.43 km2) of the study area, respectively, comparing to the existing protection zones, there is 7