Unraveling the dual interaction patterns of land use intensity on carbon balance: spatial heterogeneity and drivers in a transitional region of China

Abstract

Under China’s “Dual Carbon” goals, accurate assessment of regional carbon balance is of critical importance. Land use acts as a core factor governing carbon balance. However, the differentiated effects of land use intensity (LUI)—a comprehensive indicator quantifying human intervention on carbon storage, sequestration, and emissions, as well as their spa-tial driving factors, remain poorly understood. Here we incorporate multi-source remote sensing datasets and the GeoDetector model to systematically explore the spatio-temporal linkages between LUI and carbon balance components in Anhui Province, Chi-na, during the period 2000–2020. Our results reveal that LUI exhibits dual spatial associations on car-bon balance components: LUI shows significant negative spatial correlations with carbon storage (CSt), sequestration (CSeq), and net carbon (NetC), but a significant positive corre-lation with carbon emissions (CE). Notably, in 2020, negative association clusters, covering approximately 22% of the study area, were located in the southern mountains. In contrast, the “High LUI - High CE” agglomerations are centered in the northern urban clusters. GeoDetector further demonstrates that the spatial patterns of CSt and CSeq are primarily associated with interactions between LUI and natural factors (NDVI) (q > 0.4), while the spatial pattern of CE is dominated by interactions between LUI and socio-economic factors (GDP) (q > 0.6). These findings reveal dual interaction patterns through which LUI is associated with carbon balance—a strong joint explanatory effect of LUI and NDVI in the south and a strong joint explanatory effect of LUI and GDP in the north—providing scientific support for regional carbon governance strategies that target these two distinct patterns: protecting existing sinks in the south and curbing emissions in the north.