Regional development issues can be reflected in land use and addressed through land use restructuring. It is commonly recognized that strengthening the role of small towns in the coordinated and sustainable development of counties, towns, and villages is effective in solving land use problems. However, relevant studies do not focus on the county space and lack scale extensions to reflect the role and status of small towns. In this paper, an analytical framework is developed and some research hypotheses are proposed from the perspective of “Scale-Space” interaction. Then, a county in central China is used as a case study to reveal the mechanism of rural land use restructuring by comparing the changes in land use structure in different locations in recent years. The study finds that under the constraint of the basic principle of “Requisition-Compensation Balance”, the county has reorganized the spatial and landscape pattern of the countryside through extensive “demolition of the old” and “construction of the new”. Among them, towns that are distant from the county center, while improving their cohesion, give full play to their role as regional sub-centers, and are expected to become an important force driving urbanization in the future.

Spatiotemporal differentiation and coupled driving mechanisms of urban ecological resilience in transboundary composite economic belts remain an understudied niche within human–land coupling system research. Taking 29 prefecture-level and county-level units of the Huaihe River Eco-Economic Belt from 2014 to 2023 as research samples, this study constructs an ecological resilience evaluation framework tailored to the pollution disturbance characteristics of the Huaihe River Basin under a three-dimensional theoretical framework encompassing resistance, adaptability, and recoverability. The entropy weight method is adopted to calculate comprehensive ecological resilience values, while the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model is applied to identify spatiotemporal heterogeneous correlations among multiple influencing factors. This paper further characterizes the spatiotemporal evolutionary patterns of urban ecological resilience across the study area and unpacks the coupled associative effects of natural, economic, and social driving factors. The empirical results reveal three key findings: (1) Temporally, the overall comprehensive ecological resilience of the study region rose from 0.318 to 0.416, with a total growth rate of 30.91%. Its evolutionary trajectory follows three successive phases: rapid growth, steady improvement, and slow saturation. Adaptability, which is predominantly boosted by anthropogenic environmental governance, constitutes the primary contributor to resilience growth. The range of urban resilience values narrowed by 9.97%, indicating continuous advancement in balanced regional development. (2) Spatially, ecological resilience presents a prominent core-periphery pattern, with high-resilience zones concentrated in mountainous southwestern areas and low-resilience zones distributed across northeastern plains. All low-resilience county-level units were eliminated by 2023. (3) In terms of driving associations, topographic relief and environmental governance investment maintain persistent positive correlations with ecological resilience, while per capita GDP acts as the core economic supportive factor. The proportion of secondary industry and population density exhibit significant negative correlations with resilience. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) shifts from a negative correlation to a weak positive correlation alongside progressive ecological restoration, whereas river network variables exert negligible long-term associative impacts. Collectively, the spatiotemporally heterogeneous coupling of natural endowments, industrial-economic conditions, and social governance factors shapes the evolutionary patterns of regional ecological resilience. This study fills the research gap regarding long-timescale resilience driving mechanisms for transprovincial composite river basins covering five provinces. It identifies novel human–land coupling mechanisms, including the temporal reversal of vegetation’s ecological benefits and the dual stress imposed by industrial agglomeration and dense human settlements in plain regions. The quantitative outputs of this research can provide data-based references for differentiated coordinated ecological governance across the Huaihe Ecological Economic Belt.

Under the dual stress of climate change and intensive human activities, vegetation dynamics in the Huaihe River Basin, a typical north–south climatic transition zone in China, merit close attention. Net Primary Productivity (NPP) serves as a core metric for characterizing ecosystem carbon-sink capacity and vegetation growth status. Elucidating its spatiotemporal patterns and driving factors is of great significance for regional ecological conservation and adaptive management. Taking the Huaihe River Basin as the study area, this study utilizes MOD17A3HGF NPP datasets and multi-source geospatial data spanning 2000–2024. Integrating trend analysis, the Hurst exponent, residual analysis, and the Geodetector model, this work aims to reveal the spatiotemporal evolution and prospective change trends of vegetation NPP, and to quantitatively identify the independent and interactive effects of climate, topography, and human activities on NPP spatial differentiation. The results show that: (1) Temporally, vegetation NPP exhibits an overall fluctuating upward trend, increasing from 370 gC·m⁻²·yr⁻¹ to 475 gC·m⁻²·yr⁻¹, with a multi-year average of 422.9 gC·m⁻²·yr⁻¹. The period 2013–2014 marks a prominent inflection point for NPP growth. Spatially, NPP follows a distribution pattern of high values in the southeast and low values in the northwest. (2) NPP shows an increasing trend across 94.09% of the basin. Meanwhile, 86.27% of the study area is characterised by anti-persistence, i.e., historical vegetation improvement accompanied by prospective degradation risks, which poses substantial challenges to ecosystem resilience. (3) Climatically, precipitation exhibits strong positive correlations with NPP, followed by temperature. Topographically, the maximum NPP occurs within the elevation band of 500–1000 m and the slope gradient range of 25–35°. Human activities exert positive promotional effects over most parts of the basin, presenting a spatial gradient with high contributions in western mountainous regions, moderate contributions in eastern plains, and low contributions around urban peripheries. (4) Precipitation, elevation, and geomorphic type are the dominant driving factors. Most pairwise factor interactions produce enhanced explanatory power, among which the interaction between elevation and precipitation yields the highest explanatory capacity. This coupling reflects topographic modulation of hydrothermal conditions and the spatial redistribution of precipitation, which creates divergent water availability and vegetation habitats across terrain units. Population density exhibits weak explanatory power when acting independently; nevertheless, its explanatory capacity rises substantially after interacting with precipitation and elevation. This finding indicates that anthropogenic impacts on vegetation are embedded within specific natural environmental contexts.

This study reconceptualises marginality in China’s inter-provincial border regions as a dynamic, scale-sensitive spatial relationship rather than a static condition of underdevelopment. Using the Hubei–Henan–Anhui border area as a case study, we quantitatively assess marginality across three dimensions—production, livelihood, and ecology—based on panel data from 61 counties for 2000, 2010, and 2021. The entropy-weighted TOPSIS method is used to calculate comprehensive development indices, and geographic detector models identify key driving factors. The results show that production marginality is persistently shaped by economic level and industrial structure. Livelihood marginality exhibits a clear temporal shift: dominant drivers move from healthcare security to cultural amenities and finally to transport accessibility. Ecological marginality remains primarily determined by natural endowments such as habitat quality and ecosystem services. Theoretically, the study advances marginality analysis by integrating spatial, temporal and dimensional perspectives. Practically, it offers a diagnostic framework to support differentiated, cross-administrative governance strategies that can transform peripheral border regions into cooperative hubs.