Effects of protection and restoration on reducing ecological vulnerability

Quantitative assessment and long-term analysis of ecological vulnerability can effectively grasp the driving factors of environmental change, which is of great significance for ecological protection and restoration. This study took 381 villages in Jingle County, a typical ecological vulnerable area on the Loess Plateau, as basic evaluation unit, and an ecological vulnerability evaluation index system with 12 evaluation indexes was constructed based on "sensitivity-resilience-pressure" (SRP) conceptual model. Combined with spatial principal component analysis, spatial autocorrelation, cross-sectional and panel regression, the spatio-temporal variation characteristics and driving factors of ecological vulnerability in 2005, 2010 and 2015 were quantitatively analyzed. The results showed that areas classified as not and somewhat vulnerable were expanding, while areas classified as highly and extremely vulnerable were shrinking from 2005 to 2015. The variations of ecological vulnerability were the result of interaction of natural environment and human activities, among which Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), distance from main road and distance from river system were conducive to reducing ecological vulnerability, moreover, NDVI has the greatest impact on the probability of ecological vulnerability transition from high to low, with a regression coefficient of 46.66. The impact of social factors decreased relatively, while the role of natural factors increased, and increasing vegetation coverage and economic development helped reduce ecological vulnerability.