Spatiotemporal characteristics, environmental effects, and influencing factors of production-living-ecological space in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, China

The rapid process of urbanization and industrialization has intensified the competition for land resources among various stakeholders. The transformation of land between uses for production, living, and ecological development is becoming increasingly fierce, which in turn causes fluctuations in regional environmental quality. Examining the upper reaches of the Yangtze River (URYR), this study makes use of land use data obtained from remote sensing image interpretation for five periods from 1980-2020; the land-use transformation, environmental effects, and influencing factors in the URYR are then quantitatively analyzed by means of a transition matrix, environmental quality index, and geographical detector. The results show that from 1980-2020, land-use transformation manifested as an increase in living land and a decrease in production and ecological land. The primary type of conversion of land use occurred between production and ecological land, and the overall environmental quality of the region has declined. The high-value areas are mostly concentrated in the southwest and east, and the low-value agglomeration areas are in the central and western regions. Natural environmental factors are the basis of the environmental quality in the URYR. The influencing factors from strong to weak are topographic relief, slope, net primary productivity, mean annual temperature, altitude, land use intensity, economic density, annual average precipitation, road network density, population density, and land-use diversity.