Integrating Ecosystem Service Benefits to Assess Ecosystem Health and Its Response to Land Spatial Structure Conflicts in Anning River Basin, China

ABSTRACT Land spatial structure conflicts (LSSC) weaken the actual benefits of ecosystem services by inducing trade‐offs among them, directly threatening regional ecosystem health (EH) and sustainable development. However, most studies have failed to incorporate ecosystem service benefits (ESB) into EH assessments and have overlooked their response to LSSC, hindering the optimization of spatial structures and the formulation of ecological management policies. To address this gap, taking the Anning River basin as the study zone, this paper integrated ecosystem integrity and ESB to evaluate the spatiotemporal dynamic of EH from 2000 to 2020, then employed multiple spatial analysis models to examine the spatial correlations and driving mechanisms between EH and LSSC from both global and local perspectives. This study found that the EH of the Anning River basin had increased by 5.11% over the past two decades, while LSSC exhibited a convergence trend of 1.66%. Spatial mismatch had gradually become the dominant clustering type between EH and LSSC, concentrated in the central river valleys and northern mountainous regions. The nonlinear interactions among landscape fragility, complexity, and instability exacerbated the adverse impacts of LSSC on EH, exhibiting spatial heterogeneity. The river valley region can mitigate EH degradation by reducing landscape fragility and complexity, while the northeastern mountainous area can further enhance EH by improving spatial stability and decreasing fragility. The findings of this study provide scientific support for the coordinated development of sustainable land use and EH in the Anning River basin.