Considering Functional Heterogeneity for Ecological Network Resilience Assessment: A Case Study of the Wuhan Metropolitan Area

Rapid urbanization is reshaping land-use patterns and threatening regional ecological security, with different functional zones facing distinct pressures and ecological requirements. Existing studies predominantly apply conventional ecological source-corridor methods to formulate regional ecological network, overlooking the heterogeneity in ecological network and its resilience across functionally heterogeneous zones. To address this gap, we propose an ecological baseline-differentiated threshold method in Wuhan Metropolitan Area, which determines source selection criteria based on the ecological land proportion of each county group, and simulate progressive node removal under probabilistic, importance-based, and protection-priority scenarios to assess network resilience. Compared with the conventional uniform threshold approach, our method retains 23 additional ecological sources in urbanized zones and improves network connectivity from 0.43 to 0.51. The differentiated network sustains resilience above 0.4 until 91% of nodes are removed under the protection-priority scenario, whereas the uniform network collapses at a 66% removal rate under random attacks. We identify that 12.0% of nodes function as structural backbones, and their targeted removal drives resilience below 0.2 at a 12% removal rate, confirming cascading failure risks. Zone-specific strategies are formulated based on the identified vulnerability patterns. These findings demonstrate that incorporating ecological baseline heterogeneity into source selection enhances both structural organization and dynamic robustness, offering a cost-effective pathway for strengthening regional sustainability in functionally heterogeneous landscapes.