Assessment of the Carrying Capacity and Suitability of Spatial Resources and the Environment and Diagnosis of Obstacle Factors in the Yellow River Basin

The assessment of the carrying capacity and suitability of spatial resources and the environment can provide effective guidance for regional planning and make vital contributions to the high-quality advancement of society and the economy. Additionally, this scientific evaluation of the spatial carrying capacity and suitability of urban production–living–ecological space (PLES) has important scientific value as well as practical significance for territorial spatial planning. This paper takes the cities along the Yellow River Basin (YRB) as the research object; establishes the PLES resource and environment carrying capacity evaluation index system; uses the multi-indicator superposition method and entropy weight method to evaluate the ecological importance, production and life carrying capacity of 78 cities in the YRB from 2010 to 2020; obtains the final ecological importance, production and life suitability levels based on the carrying capacity combined with the location conditions; and uses exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA), the barrier degree model and other methods to determine the cities’ spatial and temporal patterns and influencing factors. The findings indicate that: (1) Ecological importance is characterized by “high upstream and low downstream”; the suitability for production is higher mainly in the eastern coastal area; the suitability of life as a whole is increasing, and the higher grade is in some provincial capitals and surrounding cities. (2) The local Moran’s I all passed the test, and the relationship between PLES showed a significant positive spatial correlation. The clustering characteristics of ecological importance and production suitability are strong, while the clustering characteristics of suitability for living functions are relatively weak. (3) Biodiversity, significance of water conservation and significance of wind and grit control functions are the main barrier factors affecting the ecological importance of the YRB; industrial value-added output per unit of industrial land, number of industrial enterprises above the scale and GDP per capita are the dominant factors affecting the production suitability of the study area; total water-resource utilization per capita, total sewage treatment per capita and residential land area per capita are the main barrier factors of living suitability