Ecological niche measurement and high-quality development of "the Belt and Road" core area

PLoS One. 2024 May 13;19(5):e0302550. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302550. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

A new stage in promoting the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt Core Area, and Xinjiang has been transformed from a relatively closed inland area into an open border. In order to promote the high-quality development of Southern Xinjiang and solve the imbalance contradiction between the development of the Northern Xinjiang and Southern Xinjiang, taking the four districts in Southern Xinjiang as the study area, constructing a high-quality development ecological niche index system of three levels, namely economic, social and ecological, adopting the entropy method to assign weights to the evaluation indexes, and measuring the ecological niche width and the degree of ecological niche overlap of this region in the period from 2011 to 2020. The results show that: Firstly, tourism has the greatest impact on the ecological niche of economic development in state N, with a weighting of 14.18%; Secondly, the ecological status width of economic development in state N demonstrates a structural characteristic of "low level and low gap". The average value of ecological niche width is at class III, indicating a low development status and weak regional influence; Thirdly, the ecological niche overlap of state N is significantly influenced by spatial factors. Regions Z and S are closer together, resulting in higher competition for resource utilization and an average ecological niche overlap at class II. The other two regions are at class III. According to the theory of ecological niche expansion and separation, a specialization separation strategy should be adopted for areas with "low width and high overlap", and a strengthening expansion strategy should be adopted for areas with "low width and low overlap", to optimize the structure of ecological niches and promote high-quality development of the region.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • China
  • Conservation of Natural Resources / methods
  • Ecology
  • Economic Development*
  • Ecosystem*
  • Humans

Grants and funding

This paper is funded by the National Social Science Fund of China: Study on the Cultural Coexistence Paradigm of Embeddedness Multi-ethnicof Villages in the Context of “Culture Moistening Xinjiang”, grant number 22BMZ123, which provided financial support for our data collection and investigate activities.