Coupled Coordination Relationships between Economy and Ecosystem Services at the County Scale: Evidence from the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration in China

Understanding the relationship between urban economic growth and ecosystem services is important in sustainable spatial planning, enabling urban managers to establish a coordinated development model. However, there is still a gap in research on the interrelationships and driving factors between county-level economy and ecosystem services. This study takes the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration in China as an example, selects socioeconomic indicators to evaluate economic development, selects the total output value of ecosystem services to evaluate the ecological environment, and uses the coupling coordination degree model to explore the relationship between economy and ecosystem services. Through spatial autocorrelation and geographical detector, the spatial aggregation characteristics and influencing factors of the coupling coordination degree of an economic ecosystem are revealed. The results indicate that the coupling coordination of the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration is basically between 0.2 and 0.6 in an uncoordinated stage. The number of economic lag counties is higher than that of ecological lag counties. The global Moran's I was 0.2573 (p < 0.01), and the coupling coordination degree at the county level has obvious spatial clustering characteristics, mainly manifested as high–high clusters located in the southern part of the study area and low–low clusters located in the northeast. The results of the geographical detector showed that terrain factors and human activity factors have a strong impact on the coupling coordination degree, and the interaction between two factors is stronger than the independent effect of a single factor. In taking the county as an important carrier to promote urbanization, the coupling coordination degree of the economic ecosystem at the county level in the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration still needs to be improved. Management policies should focus on zoning planning, attach importance to the mutual transformation of ecological and economic benefits, and achieve coordinated development of ecology and economy.