Spatial Clustering and Nonlinear Drivers of Urban Ecological Quality Improvement in Chinese Cities: Evidence from Urban Ecological Quality Index and Explainable Machine Learning
Understanding how urban ecological quality changes across space and why cities follow different trajectories is important for differentiated land and environmental governance. We assessed 288 Chinese prefecture-level and above cities from 2015 to 2024. The Urban Ecological Quality Index (UEQI) was constructed solely fr...