Background In the context of rapid urbanization, issues such as land desertification, soil erosion, and destruction of biodiversity threaten the safety of the regional ecological environment. Building an ecological network is an important means to effectively protect habitat patches.

Methods This paper took Urumqi as the study area, based on the 2017 land use data, utilized the morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) method to analyze the landscape pattern of the study area and extracted ecological source areas by landscape index, with data such as land use, elevation, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to construct a comprehensive resistance surface according to the actual situation of the study area, used the minimum cumulative resistance (MCR) model to identify the Urumqi ecological corridors.

Results The core area of the MSPA landscape type accounted for 73.88% of the total area, it is more in the south and east of the study area, and the area of islet patch was the smallest. By calculating the landscape index, 10 core patches in the study area with the highest patch importance index was extracted and used as ecological sources. There were 45 general corridors and 9 important corridors distributed in the southwest and northeast of the study area. According to the distribution characteristics of the source area and the actual situation in the study area, 7 new planned source areas and 10 general corridors were added, and an important stepping stone was generated to solve the fault phenomenon of the southwest and middle east of the study area.

Conculsions Constructing a reasonable ecological network can restore the blocked ecological corridors, significantly improve the landscape connectivity of the entire study area, help protect the living environment of the species and ecological breakpoints, avoid urban soil erosion. It is of great significance to promote the construction of ecological civilization, sustainable economic development and protection of the ecological environment in Urumqi.