Comprehensive management zoning of abandoned mining area: A case of four southern towns in Qijiang District of Chongqing.

After the elimination of traditional backward production capacity, abandoned mining regions often face ecological issues such as surface cracking, water depletion, and soil pollution. I comprehensively evaluated the ecological challenges and functional values of abandoned coal mining areas from the perspective of ecological land use. I employed element identification methods such as SBAS-InSAR, vulnerability assessment, linear trend analysis, and suitability evaluation, along with ecological network construction methods such as ecosystem service valuation, habitat sensitivity, and landscape connectivity to conduct a comprehensive management zoning for four southern towns in Qijiang District, Chongqing, in order to improve the efficiency of regional ecological restoration. The results showed that the mountain management area was 8.03 km², the hydrological management area was 212.07 km², the forest management area was 7.04 km², and the farmland management area was 20.07 km². There were two important ecological nodes and five general ecological nodes in the study area, mainly distributed in the southern part. The total length of ecological corridors was 172.47 km, of which important ecological corridors was 49.08 km and general ecological corridors was 123.39 km. These corridors were unevenly distributed spatially. There was an urgent need to construct important connections between the north and south. Based on governance goals, spatial scope, and key locations, we constructed a comprehensive management zoning that covered key ecological value nodes, functional connectivity corridors, and element governance units. Exploring the spatial layout of management zones and key locations from the perspective of land ecology can provide a new direction for the current mineral area restoration efforts, which mostly rely on a single research perspective.