Greenway Planning of Guangdong Province

Guangdong Province is located in the southernmost region of mainland China with a total area of 180,000 square kilometers. The GDP ranks first in China, and the economic aggregate accounts for 1/8 of China’s total. As the economic development continues, the fragmentation of ecological land is becoming more dangerous. To solve this problem, the local government organized the master planning of environmental protection. The provincial greenway planning (also called ecological corridor) proposed in this paper is an essential part of it. The total length of planned greenways in Guangdong Province is 2,836 kilometers, and its primary function is biodiversity conservation. In the master planning of environmental protection, the planning of the ecological red line has already identified ecological patches. By constructing the provincial backbone greenway to connect ecological patches and form an ecological network, it can guarantee the ecological area of an economic priority development zone like Guangdong Province to provide sustainable ecosystem services. In this paper, the traditional Minimum Cumulative Resistance method (MCR) has been optimized based on graph theory, by using the betweenness of the edge (route or corridor) and selecting the least connected subgraph with the highest betweenness of the potential greenway by irreplaceable conditions to determine the irreplaceable backbone route and key strategic points. Under the premise of ensuring connectivity, the goal of planning the least number of greenways, the smallest footprint, and the constant value of ecosystem service is achieved. In this method, the backbone structure of the eco-network that maintains ecological security is established, nodes are found which are important hub locations in the eco-network but poor ecological conditions, and greenway route redundancy problem generated by the MCR method was solved, land resources and funds are saved, the guidance and control functions of the provincial greenway system are realized. The plan has been reviewed by the local government and entered the implementation phase