Wetlands ecological security assessment in lower reaches of Taoerhe river connected with Nenjiang river using modified PSR model

Abstract

Over the past two decades, with the implementation of a series of ecological restoration projects and the comprehensive improvement projects of agriculture, most of the ecological environments in Western area of Northeast region have been significantly improved. Therefore nearly all the wetlands have been significantly improved from the perspective of landscape and vegetation cover. In particular, China has just promulgated a Wetland protection law to further promote the concept of wetland protection into society. How safe the wetlands will be after the changes is a priority. The objective of this paper is to construct an improved comprehensive evaluation model to evaluate the wetland safety situation based on several types of data. In this paper, a typical wetland area situated in the Momoge National Protected Area is selected, based on pressure-state-response (PSR) model and the mathematical method of catastrophe progression theory, geographical information system (GIS) approach is involved to improve the model parameters, the ecological security situation within the study area is evaluated from 2000 to 2020. The results show: (i) the ecological security in study area varied nonlinearly, and has been turning worse from 2000 to 2009, while during 2009 to 2020 has been turning better; (ii) the ecological security levels in Momoge wetlands region were in moderate and primary warning during the past two decades, with higher value of ecological security comprehensive index in the middle region and lower value in the east and west region in the area; (iii) the area with lower value of eco-security index is corresponded with the distribution of settlements and river valleys where the the intensity of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) is much wider and deeper than the other area. From above, it is clearly that even within national protected areas, wetlands are mostly at a moderate ecological level and unevenly distributed in study area. Influenced by human factors, wetlands are at a lower security level. From that, wetlands protection only is in the initial stage, and wetlands protection and restoration still has a long way to go.