Landscape dynamics and human disturbance processes in wetlands in a mining city: a case study in Huaibei, China

Wetlands are fragile ecosystems that are sensitive to human activities. In mining cities with high groundwater tables, underground mining, urbanization, and land reclamation cause severe disturbance to wetland landscape patterns, which poses a serious threat to the integrity and sustainability of the regional wetland ecosystems. This paper extracted the dynamic patterns of wetlands in Huaibei, China, from the Landsat TM/ETM remote sensing images with a time duration of 30 years from 1991 to 2021. The land-use transfer matrix and the landscape metrics were used to analyze the dynamic evolution of the wetland landscape patterns in this typical mining city. Afterwards, the human disturbance changes in the wetlands during the past 30 years were analyzed by the human disturbance transformation index (HTI). The correlation between the HTI and the changes in the landscape metrics were analyzed to reflect the influences of different human disturbance mechanisms on the evolution of the wetland landscape patterns. The results indicated that the wetland areas gradually increased with rising human disturbance levels from 1991 to 2021. However, the wetland landscape patterns showed a trend of declining landscape connectivity and fragmentation. The human disturbance levels to the wetlands were found significantly increased from 1991 to 2005 and from 2010 to 2015, and declined from 2005 to 2010 and from 2015 to 2021. The correlation between the HTI and landscape metrics indicates that current ecological restoration planning has limitations in improving the wetland landscape patterns. In the future, it is necessary to formulate systematic wetland landscape patterns restoration planning that covers the overall area according to the evolutionary trend of wetlands.