Nonlinear Associations and Spatiotemporal Responses between the Evolution of Blue-Green Space Landscape Patterns and Water-Environment Health in Highly Urbanized Plain River-Network Regions: A Case Study of Suzhou City, China.

Authors

Chen Xu, Shuxian Miao, LinYu Chen, Xun Zhang, Shaobo Long, Zihao Guo

Published in

Environmental research. Pages 125301. Jul 25, 2026. Epub Jul 25, 2026.

Abstract

Under rapid urbanization, the blue-green space configurations of plain river-network cities are undergoing continuous restructuring, profoundly affecting water-environment health by regulating runoff pathways, pollutant transport, and aquatic self-purification processes. However, the nonlinear, scale-dependent, and stage-specific feedback mechanisms between landscape pattern evolution and water-quality response remain poorly quantified. Using Suzhou City-a representative plain river-network city in the Taihu Lake Basin-as a case study, this research integrates long-term land-use data spanning 2004-2024 with routine water-quality records from 66 monitoring sections. Water quality was evaluated using the CCME-WQI; blue-green landscape metrics were computed within multiscale buffers of 500-2000 m; and an XGBoost-SHAP interpretable machine-learning framework was applied to compare the evolution of landscape-water-quality coupling relationships across two stages: 2004-2012 and 2016-2024. The results indicate that: (1) water-environment quality in Suzhou improved continuously from 2004 to 2024, with the proportion of Poor and Marginal sections declining from approximately 75% to below 15%, and Good or better sections rising from approximately 10% to 45%, accompanied by a pronounced structural turning point around 2016; (2) across both stages, the SHAP importance of the structural blue-space metric (LPI_BlueSpace) consistently exceeded that of the compositional metric (PLAND_BlueSpace), indicating that the retention of core water-body patches explains the spatial heterogeneity of water quality more effectively than total blue-space area; meanwhile, ED_BlueSpace exhibited a stable negative response, suggesting that fragmentation of the water-network boundary suppresses water quality; (3) the most sensitive spatial scale of blue-space influence contracted markedly, migrating from the macro-scale in the earlier stage toward meso- and micro-scales in the later stage. This study characterizes landscape-water-quality associations in highly urbanized plain river-network cities, offering exploratory empirical evidence for structural blue-green space conservation and multi-scale coordinated governance.

PMID:
42501936
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 26 Jul 2026.

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