Spatiotemporal Patterns of Natural Habitat Quality and Their Associations with Anthropogenic and Climatic Factors in the Typical Arid Municipal Area of Western China Since 2000

Dominant factors of changes in natural habitat quality in arid municipal areas of western China over recent decades remain quantitatively unverified, due to limitations in traditional attribution methods that depend on linear causality or low-dimensional interactions. We generated 30 m resolution habitat quality indexes (HQI) of Yinchuan Municipality of western China from 2000 to 2020 using the InVEST model, and then quantified the relative importance of anthropogenic and climatic variables to HQI changes by Random Forest modeling after eliminating cross-variable collinearity, taking, a typical arid Results indicate that a relatively high-level (HQI > 0.6) of the habitat quality predominated in natural habitats covering forests, shrublands, grasslands, and wetlands within Yinchuan Municipality since 2000, accounting for 76.95% of total natural habitat area. Moreover, this relatively high-level remained stable, with 93.32% of all natural habitat types over the past two decades, though the 4.78% of total natural habitat area with improvement slightly outnumbered the 1.90% of area with decline. The municipality-wide mean HQI of the natural habitats fluctuated from 0.65 in 2000 to 0.66 in 2020, which was primarily shaped by anthropogenic factors without a statistically significant monotonic trend, with population density, gross domestic product, and land use dynamic degree accounting for 31.79%–43.46%, 18.95%–27.96%, and 10.66%–18.85% of the fluctuation, respectively. Climatic factors contributed far less to the fluctuation, with the relative importance of individual variables falling in the range of annual precipitation (9.37%–14.77%), mean annual temperature (4.10%–9.61%) and annual solar radiation (3.28%–9.60%). These findings confirm the dominant role of persistent influences from anthropogenic activities rather than their temporal intensification in maintaining the stable high-level habitat quality of Yinchuan Municipality since 2000, and provide direct targeted guidance for formulating habitat quality improvement strategies that coordinate urban construction and ecological protection in arid western China.