Spatiotemporal dynamics and driving forces of water resource, socioeconomic, and ecosystem coupling in Xinjiang's oases

Oases are critical interfaces between human activities and natural systems, where coupling coordination of the water resource, socioeconomic, and ecology is essential. Existing studies have predominantly used administrative regions as their unit of analysis; however, vast undeveloped tends to dilute the signals from oases and obscure the true patterns of differentiation. This study adopts oases as the unit of analysis, utilizes an improved approximation to the ideal method based on greyscale correlation analysis to measure the degree of coupling and coordination, and employs panel vector autoregressive models and spatiotemporal geographically weighted regression models to analyse the system’s dynamic responses and identify the driving mechanisms. Results show that: (1) From 1999–2023, the average coupling coordination degree of the Xinjiang oasis system was 0.542, indicating a barely coordinated state. Northern Xinjiang faces stronger water constraints, with water subsystem scores fluctuating by −17.925% in southern Altai piedmont oases and −29.256% in northern Tianshan piedmont oases. Southern Xinjiang exhibits lower coordination but faster improvement, particularly in northern Kunlun piedmont oasis cluster, with an average annual growth rate of 0.542%; (2) There are significant bidirectional causal feedback loops between the water resources, ecological, and socioeconomic subsystems; (3) Around the 2010s, the dominant driver shifted from water to socioeconomic factors: mean contributions for socioeconomic, water resource, and ecological factors were 32.09%, 41.25%, and 26.66% before, and 42.69%, 35.66%, and 21.65% afterwards. The above findings provide a scientific basis for the differentiated management of water resources in Xinjiang’s oases and for the sustainable development of agriculture.