Ecological health analysis of wetlands in the middle reaches of Yangtze River under changing environment

Changes in wetland ecosystems have a critical impact on the local ecology and species diversity. Different development scenarios and policies are key factors influencing their changes. Therefore, we studied changes of wetlands in the middle Yangtze River basin (MYRB) in 2001–2020, and a patch-generated land use simulation (PLUS) model and random forest (RF) method were applied to predict and analyze the changes under different scenarios in the MYRB in the future (i.e.2035–2095). The results indicated that: (1) The regions with high wetland proportions were concentrated in the central and eastern MYRB in 2001–2020, with a 1.5% decrease in overall wetland area; (2) The RF could simulate the future ecological quality with training and testing accuracies of 0.98 and 0.92, respectively; (3) Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) less than 0.5 in the central and eastern regions and 13.3% reduction in the northwest in the SSP245 scenario. In general, the study provides a basis for future regional studies of ecosystem quality and provides data to support wetland conservation and management.