Land Space Ecological Restoration Zoning in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area from the Perspective of Supply and Demand of Ecosystem Services

Abstract

Territorial spatial ecological restoration zoning is an important basis for implementing differentiated protection and restoration strategies and an important premise for promoting the integrated protection and restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, fields, lakes, and grasses and regional coordinated governance. In the current research on territorial spatial ecological restoration zoning, less attention is paid to human demand for ecosystem services and territorial spatial ecological restoration zoning from the perspective of the supply and demand of ecosystem services. As a result, zoning is unable to solve the contradiction between human and land relations, which has a certain impact on the implementation of subsequent restoration projects. Therefore, from the perspective of ecosystem service supply and demand, this study considers the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as the research area, scientifically delimiting the territorial space ecological restoration zones of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and proposes differentiated protection and restoration strategies for each zone. The results show that the spatial distribution of the comprehensive supply and demand of ecosystem services in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has a strong spatial heterogeneity. The comprehensive supply capacity mainly presented a spatial distribution pattern of high in four weeks and low in the middle, and the comprehensive demand presented a spatial distribution pattern of high in the middle and gradually decreasing from the ring to the periphery. There are many towns/streets with a spatial mismatch of supply and demand of ecosystem services (low supply and high demand; high supply and low demand), accounting for approximately 85% of the total area. There are relatively few towns/streets with spatial matching (high supply and high demand; low supply and low demand), accounting for approximately 15% of the total area. However, in space, there is a trend that the internal low-supply and high-demand areas gradually transition to the external high-supply and low-demand areas in a semicircle. According to the matching of supply and demand of ecosystem services, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area was divided into four zones, and a differentiated protection and restoration strategy was proposed for each zone. In general, the key ecological conservation areas (61%) focus on nature conservation and pay attention to the maintenance of regional ecological integrity and biodiversity; the comprehensive ecological improvement zone (13%) is mainly composed of auxiliary restoration and ecological reconstruction, focusing on strengthening the construction and restoration of the suburban ecological buffer zone; the key ecological restoration areas (24%) mainly focus on auxiliary restoration and ecological remodeling to improve the ecological resilience of the area, while ecological prevention and control areas (2%) focus on nature conservation, maintaining the current ecological situation and ecological supply capacity, and preventing ecological environment degradation