Promoting ecological conservation through multi-objective ecological early warning and network regulation in the Karst Plateau, China

Ecological security networks (ESN) offer viable solutions to promote a synergistic development between ecological conservation and economic growth. However, human perceptions of ecosystem degradation often fail to keep pace with the rapid evolution of ecological damage. Therefore, we take the Karst Plateau (KP), which is a typical ecologically fragile area, as a research object, and select the SSP1-RCP1.9 (SSP119), SSP2-RCP4.5 (SSP245), and SSP5-RCP8.5 (SSP585) scenarios. The future evolutionary trends of ESN are predicted from the scarcity of ecosystem services (ES). Introduces the complex network theory to analyze the ESN microstructure's topological characteristics. Through classified regulation and zoning management to achieve early warning of ecological security. The study found that: (1) High-quality supply space is gradually shrinking owing to the ES demand shock. (2) The spatial distribution of ecological source sites is uneven, with the original large-scale ecological source areas shifting to small and dispersed ones. The area of ecological source areas will decrease significantly over time, especially in the SSP245 scenario. (3) As ecological source areas are subjected to increased incision, communities with more ecological nodes are more likely to form in future scenarios, with a tendency for important nodes to migrate southwards. (4) KP faces the challenge of rational configuration of landscape structure and ES sustainability, which needs to strengthen the supervision and protection of ecological warning zones, construct buffer zones to maintain the structural and functional integrity of ecological protection zones, and pay attention to the role of ecological improvement zones in providing sustained human well-being for the future. KP is a typical ecologically fragile zone, and the multi-objective ecological security early warning provides a strong decision-making basis for further ecological protection, as well as an ESN construction scheme that can be used as a reference for other ecologically fragile zones.