EVOLUTION AND OPTIMIZATION OF POTENTIAL ECOLOGICAL CORRIDORS AMONG FOREST PATCHES IN CHINA'S HUNAN PROVINCE FROM 2000 TO 2019

Accelerating urbanization in China's Hunan Province has fragmented natural landscapes through road and railway construction.Will this affect the potential ecological corridors between forests?Taking 42 forests with an area greater than 100 km in Hunan Province from 2000 to 2019 as the research objects, land type, night light, and vegetation cover index were selected as resistance factors.Based on the theory of the minimum cumulative resistance model, a potential ecological corridor network for forests was constructed.The Kruskal and K-Means algorithms were utilized to optimize the ecological corridors between forest patches.The results indicated that from 2000 to 2019, the length of forest ecological corridors in Hunan Province increased by 12.39%.Some potential ecological corridors gradually disappeared, and the number of potential ecological corridors around cities was significantly lower than in rural areas.Furthermore, the density of potential ecological corridors in southwestern Hunan was higher than in northeastern Hunan.After optimization, the total length of potential ecological corridors between forests in Hunan Province was significantly reduced.Compared to Kruskal's algorithm, the number of corridors forming a "closed loop" between forests increased, enhancing the mutual connectivity of geographically close forests.