ABSTRACT
Regional integration is a development strategy that synergizes various components as a whole to maximize overall benefits. The natural heterogeneity and fluidity of ecosystem service (ES) make it a promising target for regional integration. However, the current focus on regional integration was more on the socio-economic factors rather than ecological resources, and the understanding of the supply-demand relationship and potential flow of ecosystem services was still limited. Therefore, we attempted to interpret ecological integration management by linking ES budgets, bundles, and flows in this study. The results showed that the spatial mismatches of ESs supply-demand were observed in all six selected ES types. Most of the ESs deficit regions were concentrated in urban centers, while ES surplus regions were scattered in surrounding rural areas. Multiple heterogeneous ES resources could ideally benefit an additional 0.13-4.84 million people in 9-70 townships through potential ES flows under ecological integration management. Therefore, we connected the service provisioning areas (SPAs) and service beneficiary areas (SBAs) with three types of ES flows and drew the potential provider-beneficiary relationship networks at the townships/bundles scale, demonstrating the interactive relationship of ecological integration within the region. On this basis, we also proposed the applicability matrix of governance tools for the first time according to the type of ES flows, and then put forward the corresponding governance opinions around the two aspects of "improving ES budges within clusters" and "strengthening ES flow among clusters". This study provided an ecological perspective for understanding regional integration, and relevant conclusions can inform environmental policy priorities for sustainable decision-making in urbanized areas.
ABSTRACT
The land use planning and management of urban fringe areas have become major governmental agendas under the background of continuing periurbanization processes. Quantifying land use functions (LUFs) and their interactions as rationales for spatial planning can aid in formulating a more effective and sustainable land use management system. Considering that most of the previous research on LUFs focused on large-scale regions, research on local-scale districts such as urban fringe is still limited. Therefore, the objective of this work is to map the spatial distribution of LUFs and their level of provision around an urban fringe area, so as to identify LUFs synergies and trade-offs in relation to urban expansion and environmental protection planning. To achieve this target, we have proposed an improved LUFs classification system that was suitable for small-scale regions. Fine scale multivariate datasets were used to meet the practical requirements of spatial planning. The urban fringe areas of Binzhou city in China was taken as a case study to quantify and analyze nine kinds of sub-land use functions. The interactions among LUFs and their cold-hot spots were measured through Spearman correlation analysis and bivariate local Moran's I respectively. The results demonstrated a heterogeneous spatial pattern of multiple LUFs and the diverse interactions among them. The social production function presented an obvious regional distribution, the residents' living functions were greatly affected by the radiation of the urban central areas, and the ecological regulation functions were closely related to the land use types. According to the LUFs clustering results, we proposed two spatial planning-zoning schemes based on the land use function and human utilization intensity. The integrative approach and the proposal of functional zones developed in this paper are applicable to provide a new perspective for spatial planning and peri-urban land use management.