The evaluation for the impact of land use change on habitat quality: A joint contribution of cellular automata scenario simulation and habitat quality assessment model

China has experienced the most serious habitat degradation. Even though increasing attentions have been brought to this issue, we still lack the understanding of the impact of land use change on habitats. This study proposed an integrated framework with cellular automata (CA) scenario simulation and the “Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Trade-offs” (InVEST) model to evaluate how different landscape dynamics could exert influences on habitat quality. Unlike other methods, our approach evaluates habitat quality by analyzing land use cover in conjunction with habitat threats. The data needed in the framework is readily available spatial data, the demand is relatively low so that our approach is more useful in the data-scarce situation, and incorporating CA simulation facilitates the predictive scenario analysis. We simulated three alternative future scenarios with different development orientations by CA (fast urban sprawl, smart urban expansion, and ecology conservation scenario), and assessed the habitat quality in each scenario by the InVEST model. Results show that in current (2014) land use scenario, “moderate” grade (habitat quality value: 0.4-0.6) occupies the largest proportion (37.62%), and “poor” grade (0-0.2) area takes up 2.82%, concentrates in urban and peri-urban fringe, which proves the degrading impacts from urbanization. The impact of future land use change varies with different land use scenario: in fast urbanization scenario, the landscape displays complete habitat degradation, while the ecology conservation scenario shows the converse trend. The interesting finding is, the degrading impacts of urbanization could be weakened, or even eliminated by the smart urban growth scenario. It suggests that the trade-off between habitat conservation and urban development could be achieved.