Evaluating Future Habitat Quality Change Under Urban Development in Southern China with Different City Compaction Scenarios

Rapid urban extension, accompanied by intensive landscape changes, significantly affects the habitats. Promoting sustainable urban development such as compact city policy is essential for ecosystem trade-offs. Previous studies tended to investigate how urbanization influences the ecosystem considering future climate and population projection. Few studies examined the impact of urban patterns on habitat quality at a fine resolution. This study builds a framework to demonstrate future urban evolution using a bottom-up Cellular Automata (CA) model and a top-down Markov model, and then incorporated the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs (InVEST) model to assess corresponding habitat quality. Three compact city scenarios in 2040 and 2060 are proposed in the Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). The results show that the highly compact scenario presents the most severe habitat quality degradation from 2020 to 2040 due to the remarkable urbanization of surrounding farmland. By 2060, new urban clusters will easily form by intensifying medium-compact scenarios, causing massive vegetation loss. The GBA has significant spatial heterogeneity in habitat quality variation because of the uneven development between the central and surrounding cities. Our results can provide insights for developing long-term land use strategies considering regional differences to balance ecological conservation and urbanization requirements