1. Introduction
As
a complex and dynamic process, urbanization is evolving over multiple
spatial-temporal scales (Grimm, 2008), and could be characterized as
four aspects: economic growth, population migration, social
transformation, and urban space expansion (Gu, 2019). How to
comprehensively assess the urbanization level is a key issue to maintain
the stable growth of urbanization in recent decades. Furthermore, the
key scientific gap in urbanization assessment is gradually changing from
single scale to multi-scale, and the
comprehensive assessment
framework involving population, economy, space and society has been
distinguished widely (Wang, 2019; Feng, 2021). Meanwhile, there are
significant offsets in the urbanization level among countries due to
global integration, especially in developing countries. Urbanization
rate at the global scale is predicted to rise to 68% by 2050 (United
Nations, 2018). The intensive human activities accompanying urbanization
have affected the natural environments, causing ruinous ecosystem
degradation (Yi, 2018; Zhao, 2022). Therefore, quantitative estimating
urbanization is important for ensuring the human-land harmony
relationship and achieving regional sustainable development.
Ecosystem health is judged as a key indicator for weighing ecosystem
quality (Li, 2021). Compared to other indicators (e.g., biological
integrity, ecological footprint and ecological carrying capacity),
ecosystem health considers not only critical consequences of human
activity, but also, responses of an ecosystem to environmental changes,
which becomes an ideal endpoint for ecosystem management (Costanza,
1999; Rapport, 2000). Building healthy ecosystems that sustainably
provide a mixed bag of valuable ecosystem services is the crucial design
goal of our ongoing ecological engineering (Costanza, 2012). Ecosystem
health was first used to assess and identify land health (Leopold,
1941), then Rapport (1989) expanded its connotation by analogy with
human health. Costanza (1992) marked ecosystem health by a comprehensive
measuring of system resilience, organization and vigor. Since human
activities are primarily related to the land resources, the health of
terrestrial ecosystems affects important ecological functions and the
provision of a range of valuable ecosystem services.
A healthy terrestrial ecosystem should restrain or rapidly recover from
some unexpected disturbances issuing from natural or human activities
and shows diversity, complexity and robustness (Ma, 2016). Research on
terrestrial ecosystem health should consider both health state
identification and driving mechanisms analysis (He, 2019). Many studies
have estimated ecosystem health for wetlands (Sun, 2016), forests (Meng,
2019) and urbans (Su, 2009). Biological indicator and index system
method are the current measures for terrestrial ecosystem health
measurement. The former is
satisfactory with single
ecosystem and requires many measured species data, while the latter is
not bound by the number, type and data of ecosystems and is widely used
for terrestrial ecosystem health estimation (Liu, 2015). Compared with
other methods (e.g., Press–State–Response (PSR), the Ecological
Modeling Method (EMM), Driving-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR),
etc.), the vigor-organization-resilience (VOR) method can better
denominate some environmental changes, ecosystem service state, and
spatial effects from a microscopic perspective (Xie, 2022), which was
adopted in our study.
As a natural-society-economic coupling system, terrestrial ecosystem
health status will be affected by multiple natural and human factors
(Xu, 2022; Li, 2023), such as land use intensity and social-economic
activities (Cheng, 2018; Yang and song, 2020). Furthermore, the
interaction among natural (e.g., climate and topography) and
anthropogenic factors would enhance the uncertainty of terrestrial
ecosystem health (Shen, 2020; Xu, 2022). Likewise, the city is an open
human-land coupling social system, and the urbanization process is
driven by many aspects. Among them, social and economic factors such as
marketization, industrialization, trade, education, democracy, and
transportation have become favorable factors to promote urbanization
(Zhang and Du, 2022). However, the influence of geographical factors is
rarely included, which should be considered when conducting urban
dynamics analysis (Christensen, 2016). In addition, the negative impact
of urbanization on terrestrial ecosystem health has been explored (Peng,
2015; Zeng, 2023). With the joint efforts of the government, society and
individuals to protect and restore ecological environment, this
situation has changed. However, its driving mechanism remains unclear.
China’s tremendous economic transformation in the past 20 years has
driven the rapid urbanization. Similar to most countries in the world,
the urban spatial pattern develops from individual cities to urban
agglomerations and metropolitan areas. However, inter-region and
inner-region differences in economic growth rates have resulted in
uneven and insufficient development. Meanwhile, the irrational land
expansion driven by resources has led to serious environmental pollution
and landscape fragmentation, seriously threatening the regional
terrestrial ecosystem health. In addition, the driving mechanisms of
urbanization and terrestrial ecosystem health vary remarkably among
regions due to the differences in economic foundation, development
patterns, natural resources and social cultures (He, 2019; Cai, 2021).
Therefore, it is necessary to explore the tie between terrestrial
ecosystem health change and urbanization for simultaneously enhancing
economic development and environment conservation in future.
In this paper, we first constructed a comprehensive index determined
from the entropy method to assess urbanization, and used the VOR method
to quantify and estimate the terrestrial ecosystem health. Then, the
bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis was adopted to describe their
spatial dependence. Finally, the driver pathways at the national scale
and the regional scale were analyzed based on the partial least squares
structural equation model to reveal their driving mechanisms. Our
objectives are: (1) Evaluating the spatial and temporal evolutions of
urbanization and terrestrial ecosystem health in China from 2000 to
2020; (2) Demonstrating the spatial dependence of terrestrial ecosystem
health and urbanization; (3) Revealing the magnitudes and directions of
drivers for urbanization and terrestrial ecosystem health changes. Our
study could confer a theoretical basis for the harmonized development of
high-quality urbanization and terrestrial ecosystem health.