Spatial-temporal variation, driving mechanism and management zoning of ecological resilience based on RSEI in a coastal metropolitan area

Urbanization results in drastic land use/cover change (LUCC) and ecological resilience (ER) issues, which has become an important and urgent question of regional sustainability. This study applied the remote sensing ecological index (RSEI) to represent the ER, and further combined ordinary least squares (OLS), and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to analyze the spatiotemporal variations of ER and LUCC at the regional and city scales from 1990 to 2020 in Hangzhou Bay Metropolitan Area (HBMA), explore the relationship between ER and LUCC, and apply for urban resilience management zoning. The results demonstrated that the ER in HBMA showed a characteristic of “slightly worse overall and improved locally”, the mean value of which decreased from 0.508 in 1990 to 0.502 in 2020. Specifically, the ER in Shanghai, Shaoxing, and Ningbo increased, and others decreased. ER exhibited a very obvious spatial aggregation feature of “high value in the southwest and low value in the northeast”. The spatiotemporal dynamic feature of LUCC from 1990 to 2020 depicted that the expansion of construction land was at the expense of occupying cropland. The LUCC degree and population have significant negative effects on the ER. The ER management zoning of HBMA could be divided into five zones, namely the ecological core protection area, ecological monitoring area, ecological optimization area, ecological restoration area, and ecological potential governance area. Results of this study could provide a more comprehensive understanding of ER change in metropolitan areas and the implication of resilience management was provided to improve the adaptation and sustainable development of the coastal urban area.