What Are the Correlations between Human Disturbance, the Spatial Pattern of the Urban Landscape, and Eco-Environmental Quality?

Abstract

Human transformation of the landscape is reflected in its composition and spatial pattern. Therefore, exploring the response of the eco-environment to the composition and spatial pattern of the landscape is beneficial to providing a theoretical basis for urban planners. In this study, we take a typical oil city in China as an example and introduce the hemeroby index, landscape metrics, and a remote sensing-based ecological index (RSEI) to calculate and evaluate the urban landscape pattern, human disturbance, and eco-environmental quality, as well as exploring the relationships between them. The results demonstrate that the mean RSEI value of the study area was 0.4866, indicating that its eco-environmental quality was relatively moderate. The whole study area had a relatively high degree of human disturbance (hemeroby index = 7.4498), where the effect of human disturbance on the eco-environment was more intense in natural ecosystems, such as forest and grasslands, but less intense in artificial landscapes, such as built-up areas and farmlands. The urban landscape pattern was significantly correlated with eco-environmental quality, among which the proportion of green space and impervious surface had the strongest correlations with the mean RSEI, with correlation coefficients of 0.538 and −0.577, respectively. In addition, the correlation between the landscape pattern and the RSEI presented obvious spatial heterogeneity.