Distinguishing the relative contributions of landscape composition and configuration change on ecosystem health from a geospatial perspective

Understanding the impact mechanisms of landscape composition and configuration change on ecosystem health (EH) is critical to ecosystem conservation and human well-being. However, existing studies mainly focused on EH changes due to combined effects of landscape composition and configuration change, while the individual impacts and spatial heterogeneity of these factors on EH remain unclear. Thus, taking Chongqing as an example, this study distinguished the relative contributions of landscape configuration and composition on EH based on scenario analysis method, and further explored how these impacts change between and within different topographic, geological and urbanization zones. The results showed that EH displayed an improving trend during 2000-2020, with the increasing areas distributed in the mountainous of southeast and northeast in Chongqing, largely influenced by increased forest landscape cohesion and their synergistic effects with forest expansion, accounting for 91.05 % and 87.86 % of the study area respectively, while the decreasing areas were mostly located in urban cores, dominated by changes in landscape composition (e.g. farmland reclamation and urban sprawl), accounting for 50.95 % of area proportion. The scenario analysis of EH showed that the areas dominated by landscape configuration were 5.39 times greater than the landscape composition under the same climate scenario. In terms of zoning comparison, the influence of landscape composition change on EH displayed the greatest difference within urbanization zones, while topographic zones for landscape configuration change. This paper provides a novel perspective to explore the impact of landscape pattern on EH, which is important to regional ecosystem conservation and land use management.