Vegetation restoration reduces landscape ecological risk in the Loess Plateau

Abstract

Vegetation restoration (VR) is critical for enhancing the resilience of fragile ecosystems, yet its impact on landscape ecological risk (LER) remains uncertain. The VR project on the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi Province (LPSX) was taken as a case study to address ecological and environmental challenges, including soil erosion and land degradation. This study used multi-source data, including land cover, fractional vegetation cover, and nighttime light. It employed landscape pattern analysis, spatio-temporal correlation analysis, and causality analysis to assess the impacts. This study found a generally positive relationship between VR and the mitigation of LER in LPSX, though spatial and temporal variations exist from 2000 to 2020. Localized VR significantly influenced 17.66 % to 27.03 % of the study area. Positive effects were mainly observed in sandy and gully-hilly regions, showing an upward fluctuating trend that peaked at 21.91 % in 2010. After 2010, negative effects in the Fen-Wei Plain, Qinling Mountains, and Liupan Mountains outweighed the positive effects and continued to expand. Urbanization had a broader impact on LER distribution compared to VR. The findings indicate that future VR projects should focus on the spatial pattern of restoration and its associated eco-social effects to ensure sustainable development.

Keywords

Vegetation restoration / Landscape ecological risk / Spatial heterogeneity / Urbanization / The Loess Plateau

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Hu Yu: Writing – original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Xinyue Hu: Visualization, Software, Formal analysis. Ling Yao: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the staff of the Desert Control Research Institute of Shannxi Province and the Xindian Gou Soil and Water Conservation Station who gave of their time and expertise. Additionally, we thank the teachers who accompanied us on the field trip to Shaanxi, who provided a lot of insights about the local area. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 23AZD062). Finally, we thank our anonymous reviewers a lot for their helpful input on the manuscript.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100320.

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