Assessment of the ecological carrying capacity based on high resolution data: A case study of Yuxian, China

Evaluation of ecological carrying capacity has a great significance on ecosystem health and sustainable development. The sustainable development of ecological environment has become one of the most prominent issues in China. The high resolution data include GF1, ZY1-02C and ZY3 were obtained from China Center for Resources Satellite Data and Application. We resampled these data to 5m due to the different spatial resolution. It was applied Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) to extract the water of the mining area and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to analyze the vegetation coverage, which can provide indicators for the next processing and analysis. The results of classification were used as basic evaluation factors to establish the evaluation index system of ecological environment. Through the comprehensive analysis and investigation of the ecological environment in the mining area of Yuxian, a novel evaluation index of the ecological carrying capacity was presented with the aspects of biological abundance index, vegetation coverage index, water density index and natural geographical factors etc. With the comprehensive assessment model, the values of ecological carrying capacity of Yuxian from 2013 to 2015 were calculated. The values of ecological carrying capacity were 70.77, 67.22, and 69.92 (total score: 100) during the period of 2013-2015. In addition, the per capita ecological carrying capacity based on the balance factor and the yield factor of Hebei province was also calculated by the method of ecological footprint. The results showed that the ecological condition was not optimistic and mining activities had some influences on the stability of ecosystem.