Coordinative enhancement of ecological security and the aesthetic viewing service in the ecological restoration of mining landscapes

Abstract An important issue in the United Nations plan for the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is how to enhance the overall social–ecological benefits by optimizing the spatial and temporal arrangements of ecological restoration. However, there was a lack of a benefit assessment system combining ecological, social, and economic indicators, and the methodology for identifying directions for ecological restoration remains controversial, especially in mining landscapes. By integrating the aesthetic viewing service into assessments of ecological restoration benefits on mining landscapes, four benefit objectives were evaluated, including habitat conservation, climate regulation, residential viewsheds, and conservation cost, and a multi‐objective optimization for ecological restoration of mining landscapes was performed. The results demonstrated that multiobjective ecological restoration could provide comprehensive ecological–social–economic benefits compared with a single‐objective restoration, since selecting the top 50% of the multiobjective restoration areas would achieve 80% climate regulation, 63% habitat protection, and 54% residential viewshed benefits and would result in 295%, 200%, and 114% higher benefits, respectively, than the minimization cost objective. The restoration priority map showed that only 17% of the landscape needed to be restored to forest among the top 30% of degraded areas that need to be restored. In conclusion, ecological restoration of mining landscapes required attention to win–win situations with multiobjectives. Coordinated arrangement of restoration of different ecosystems in different ages was the key to obtaining maximum socioecological benefits.