Integrating regional and interregional approaches to identify ecological security patterns

As an important type of sustainable landscape patterns, ecological security patterns focus on the spatial assessment of landscape function importance. However, there is a lack of attention to the scale effect, one of core cognitions of landscape ecology, especially the impact of extent changes on sustainable landscape patterns. Taking Weifang City and its surrounding six cities as the study area, this study was aimed to integrate regional and interregional approaches to identify ecological security patterns with a special focus on the effect of spatial extent changes. We assessed the ecosystem service importance and integrated the ecological sources identified in view of regional and interregional perspectives. The key or fragile ecological corridors were then identified and the differences of ecological security patterns in different approaches were explored through several landscape metrics. 11 central ecological sources and 21 surrounding ecological sources were identified. 70% key ecological corridors were the interregional ecological corridors across Weifang City and other cities. Different study extents would cause up to about 24% of the difference in high ecosystem service importance areas of Weifang City, and the corridor connectivity could be improved in the ecological security patterns by integrating the regional and interregional approaches. This study made up for the shortcomings of identifying sustainable landscape patterns within the single spatial extent, especially the discontinuity of ecological sources between the adjacent areas through regional approach, and the neglected local ecological land conservation through interregional approach.