Ecological restorations enhance ecosystem stability by improving ecological resilience in a typical basin of the Yangtze River, China

Abstract

Ecological restorations (ERs) have been widely implemented in recent decades to enhance ecosystem stability. However, the extent of their impacts on ecosystem stability and the underlying mechanism remain poorly understood. This study developed a comprehensive framework for ecosystem stability assessment by integrating the temporal stability of ecosystem service (ES) provision, ecological resistance, and ecological resilience. Additionally, ER intensity was quantified using vegetation index trends, while the pathways and magnitudes of key factors driving ecosystem stability were identified by partial least squares structural equation modeling. Using the Jialing River Basin as a case study, our results revealed that forests exhibited the highest ecosystem stability due to their enhanced capacity to maintain temporal stability of ES provision and ecological resilience. However, farmlands demonstrated the strongest ecological resistance, followed by forests and grasslands. ER projects were primarily implemented in northern and southern farmland regions characterized by low ecological resilience. Pathway analysis identified that favorable climates significantly enhanced the temporal stability of ES provision, and rugged topography improved the ecological resistance. However, fragmented landscape patches disrupted stable ES provision by reducing ecological connectivity, and socioeconomic development diminished both resistance and resilience through land-use intensification. Notably, ERs improved ecological resilience, which in turn elevated overall ecosystem stability. Our results indicated that the proposed framework provides a systematic approach for comprehensive ecosystem stability evaluation and offers critical insights for developing region-specific ER strategies.

Keywords

Ecosystem stability / Ecological restoration / Ecosystem services / Ecological resistance / Ecological resilience / Jialing River Basin

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yixiao Li: Writing – original draft, Validation, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Zhengyuan Zhao: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. Bojie Fu: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Yunlong Zhang: Visualization, Software, Methodology. Yihe Lü: Investigation, Data curation. Ting Li: Visualization, Software, Methodology. Shiliang Liu: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. Gang Wu: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. Xi Zheng: Supervision, Conceptualization. Xing Wu: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Data curation, 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

This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Project (Grants No. 2022YFF1303204 and 2024YFF1307902), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42271099). We would like to thank the editor and the reviewers for valuable suggestions and comments to improve the previous version of the manuscript.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100357.

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