Abstract
The Yellow River Basin (YRB) is a typical ecologically fragile area in both the Chinese and global contexts. This paper built a sensitivity-resilience-pressure model to evaluate the ecological vulnerability (EV) of the YRB at the grid and prefecture-level regional scales; explored the spatiotemporal characteristics of EV; and scrutinized the impacts of socioeconomic driving factors on EV. The results showed that (1) at the grid and prefecture-level regional scales, EV decreased from the upper to lower reaches, and high vulnerability was observed in the provincial capital city. Mild and severe vulnerability constituted the main EV types in the YRB. (2) The EV index of the YRB decreased from 2.71 to 2.56 in the study period, indicating that the ecological environment improved in the YRB. The slightly and lightly vulnerable areas experienced shrinking-expansion changes, and the overall areas of these two EV types showed expanding trends, while the areal changes and overall trends of the moderately, severely, and extremely vulnerable areas were contrary to those of the slightly and lightly vulnerable areas. (3) The impacts of socioeconomic driving factors on EV dynamically strengthened with the improvement of the socioeconomic level. After considering the interactions of all socioeconomic factors, the explanatory power of the spatial differentiation of EV was enhanced, and the influence of these factors became more prominent.
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This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42271192); the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of China Ministry of Education (20YJCZH166); the Key Scientific Research Projects of Colleges and Universities in Henan Province (23A170002); and Henan Province Higher Education Think Tank Research Project (2022ZKYJ05).
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**aorui Wang: Conceptualization, Writing—review & editing, Supervision and Funding acquisition; Liangrong Duan: Data curation and Writing—Original draft; Tianjiao Zhang: Methodology, Investigation, Visualization; Wen Cheng: Visualization; Qi Jia: Software and Data curation; Jiangsu Li: Conceptualization, Writing—review & editing, Supervision and Funding acquisition; Mingyue Li: Writing—Original draft and Methodology.
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Wang, X., Duan, L., Zhang, T. et al. Ecological vulnerability of China’s Yellow River Basin: evaluation and socioeconomic driving factors. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 115915–115928 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-30622-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-30622-5