Construction of ecological security pattern of the Chinese section of the "Silk Road Economic Belt" based on the minimum cumulative resistance model

The six northwestern provinces are much of the Chinese section of the "Silk Road Economic Belt", and the ecological environment is relatively fragile, with serious soil erosion, which, together with rapid economic and social development, may lead to changes in land use patterns and inadequate supply of ecosystem services, impacting China's regional ecological protection as well as the "Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutral" goals. This paper is designed to address the issue of land use change and inadequate supply of ecosystem services in six provinces in Northwest China. To this end, this paper has constructed three different levels of ecological security patterns in the study area based on the spatial-temporal pattern changes of land use and cold hotspot changes of ecological service value (ESV) in six provinces and regions in Northwest China. The results show that from 2000 to 2018, there is a significant increase around urban and rural construction land (66.06%) and a small decrease around grassland and water bodies (-1.72% and -13.53%) in the study area, with a large-scale interconversion of all categories. The ecological service value cold hotspot distribution is relatively stable in space and has little change in time. The ecological source areas of low, medium, and high ecological safety patterns are 9,889,930, 13,444,520 and 40,067,460 hm(2), respectively, and the number of ecological corridors is 987, 1051 and 1063, with lengths of 5295.57 km, 5729.49 km, and 6566.69 km, respectively. The construction of ecological security pattern based on ecological service value can provide a reference for regional ecological protection and security.