Abstract: As the first cross-provincial pilot project of ecological compensation in China, the ecological compensation in Xin'an River Basin has gone through three rounds of pilot stages and entered the construction stage of Xin'an River-Qiandao Lake Ecological Compensation Experimental Area. The ecological compensation policy has been extended to rural ecological environment protection and governance, industrial structure adjustment, villagers' employment and living standards and other fields, all of which have direct impacts on the quality of rural living environment. Scientific research on spatio-temporal heterogeneity of rural habitat environment quality and its influence mechanism is of great significance to promote the optimization of ecological compensation mechanism. Therefore, data of 10 counties (districts or cities) in the Xin'an River-Qiandao Lake Ecological Compensation Experimental Area from 2011 to 2019 were selected, and entropy-weighted TOPSIS method and geographically and temporally weighted regression model were applied to comprehensively evaluate the quality of rural habitat environment in this area. The results show that: (1)the comprehensive quality of rural habitat environment, as well as the quality of rural ecological environment and rural living environment subsystems were on the rise in the Xin'an River-Qiandao Lake Ecological Compensation Experimental Area during the study period, while the rural production environment was deteriorating. (2) The spatial distribution of the quality of rural habitat environment in the Xin'an River-Qiandao Lake Ecological Compensation Experimental Area was high in the east and west and low in the middle. (3) In the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of rural habitat environment in the study area, the ecological environment factor is the dominant factor, the ecological compensation policy is the external driving factor, and the production and living environment factors are the internal driving factors. Among them, the ecological compensation index, water quality of Xin'an River Basin, per capita gross output value of rural agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery, per capita disposable income in rural areas, the level of rural medical facilities, and the proportion of rural low income households are the main factors driving the improvement of rural habitat environment quality in the Xin'an River-Qiandao Lake Ecological Compensation Experimental Area during the study period, and the influence of those factors has shown a rising trend over time.

Key words: rural human settlement, temporal and spatial differentiation, entropy-weighted TOPSIS, GTWR model, Xin'an River-Qiandao Lake Ecological Compensation Experimental Area