Ecological zoning for regional sustainable development using an integrated modeling approach in the Bohai Rim, China

•An integrated modeling approach was developed in ecological zoning for sustainability.•Three zones are the highly-, moderately- and lowly-important ecological areas.•Three zones occupy 23.2, 37.9 and 38.9% each, and the first two should be protected.•This zoning can greatly solve the conflicts between protection and development.•The obtained map provides clear visualization of the ecological pattern to the society.

China is in its quick social and economic development which has caused various environmental problems to some extent. Ecological zoning and distinguishing the highly-important ecological areas (also termed as the ecological red-line zone in this study) and protecting them from anthropogenic interference is an effective measure for regional environment protection and sustainable development. In this study, we applied an integrated modeling approach to implement the ecological zoning in the Bohai Rim for regional sustainability, and selected 12 single factors to calculate three integrated indicators: ecosystem sensitivity, ecosystem services and ecological risks. Based on three integrated indicators, we obtained the ecological zoning map with three zones for the study area, which are the highly-important ecological areas, the moderately-important ecological areas and the lowly-important ecological areas. The zoning result showed that the highly- and moderately-important ecological zones cover 23.2% and 37.9% of the Bohai Rim respectively, which should be protected. The remained lowly-important ecological zone covers 38.9% of the Bohai Rim, which can be used for economic and industry development. This study shows that the zoning approach is reasonable and instructive to guide and arrange the land use for regional sustainable development. Such an ecological zoning can greatly solve the conflicts between environmental protection and regional economic and industry development and further forms a safe ecological pattern. Two contributions of our work are that (1) our modeling approach is scientific, reasonable and meaningful for other planning works and can be used for reference to the regions and countries with similar situation, and (2) the zoning pattern mapped in our study is helpful to guide Bohai regional development and the safe arrangement of economic and industry development.