Landscape-based ecological resilience and impact evaluation in arid inland river basin: A case study of Shiyang River Basin

Due to extreme weather and human disturbances, the ecological conditions in the arid inland river basins of Northwest China are becoming more precarious. Furthermore, tackling a variety of ecological concerns and improving ecosystem stability depends heavily on ecological resilience (ER). We measure the spatial pattern of the overall ER of the Shiyang River Basin (SRB) by incorporating the landscape pattern into the multi-indicator evaluation system based on previous ER evaluations and combining the weights of the indicators calculated by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. After that, we use the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm to analyze the impacts of the various ER factors. Results showed that among the 17 ecological sources identified in the SRB, the Qilian Mountain region hosted the largest ecological source, and all of the sources had excellent ecological values. The area with the highest ER value in the SRB is located in the Qilian Mountain region. In the overall feature importance results of the basin estimated by XGBoost, dPC obtained the highest score of 0.74; additional study of the various regions revealed the spatial heterogeneity of the ER impact factors in various regions. This study advances the methodological framework for evaluating ecological resilience from the standpoint of landscape patterns, which can enhance the arid inland river area's ecological environment quality and offer strong backing for improved management of the basin's ecological protection efforts.