Spatiotemporal Evolution and Influencing Factors of Urban Ecological Resilience: Evidence from the Yellow River Basin, China

Improving the ecological resilience in the Yellow River Basin is a crucial way to achieve ecological conservation and high-quality development in the region. Based on the panel data from 2011 to 2023 of 57 cities in the Yellow River Basin, the ecological resilience of each city was measured by using the Catastrophe Progression Model, and its spatial differences and dynamic evolution characteristics were analyzed by the Dagum Gini coefficient and kernel density estimation. At the same time, the STIRPAT model was integrated with the random forest model to identify the key factors influencing urban ecological resilience. The results demonstrated the following: (1) The urban ecological resilience in the Yellow River Basin exhibited a slight upward trend during 2011–2020 and presented a gradient spatial pattern with “high in the east and low in the west”. (2) Hypervariation density is the main source of spatial difference in urban ecological resilience, with trailing and polarization phenomena across the entire basin and its three major subregions. (3) There was significant regional heterogeneity of influences in the urban ecological resilience, with upstream, midstream, and downstream regions characterized by low interference intensity, high sensitivity, and strong adaptability, respectively.