Construction and Optimization of Ecological Network in Kuqa, China

The ability to achieve coordinated progress towards ecological protection has become an important ecological network, is the basic guarantee, and an important way to achieve regional and urban ecological security. This study takes Kuqa City as the research area, using the Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA) method and the landscape connectivity index to extract the ecological source area. After establishing the comprehensive resistance surface, the Minimum Cumulative Resistance (MCR) model is used to identify the ecological corridor, and the source area and the corridor are combined to construct the ecological network of the study area. The analysis results show that the area of cropland continued to rise in 2020, and the area of woodland and grassland decreased; the overall analysis of the ecological security pattern yielded good results, and the main influencing factors were terrain and altitude. We extracted eight ecological source areas, and the distribution structure of the source sites formed two large source site communities in the north and south, with a clear break in the middle. After establishing a comprehensive resistance surface, 28 general corridors were identified using the MCR model. Corridors are more scarce in the western part of the study area, so seven important corridors have been identified according to the gravity model, and four new sources have been added to expand the ecological network coverage area, which can solve the fault phenomenon between the southwest and middle east. Constructing a reasonable ecological network can significantly improve the landscape connectivity of the entire study area, which is conducive to promoting the construction of ecological civilization in Kuqa City, and is of great significance to sustainable development and the protection of the ecological environment.