Abstract: Habitat quality is closely related to its suitability provided by land use/land cover type for biodiversity. In order to explore the characteristics of the changes of habitat quality caused by land use, reveal the fragility of the regional ecosystem, and provide a reference for the improvement of ecological service functions and regional ecological environmental protection, the urban agglomeration on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains was selected as the study area. Based on the land use data from 2000 to 2020, the InVEST model was adopted to measure the habitat quality from the spatial and temporal dimensions. Subsequently, the Moran index was used to analyze the spatial characteristics of habitat quality. The research results prove that:(1) The index of the overall habitat quality of the urban agglomeration on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains from 2000 to 2020 was above 0.8. Although the area with poor and worse habitat quality accounted for a higher proportion of the total study area, the overall trend is toward good and excellent development direction; (2) The habitat quality of the area of the urban agglomeration on the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains that has changed from excellent and good grades to poor and worse grades, accounted for 3.75% of the whole study area, while the area continued to deteriorate from poor to worse grades accounted of 10% of the whole study area; (3) Both the high-value Moran index areas and low-value Moran index areas of the urban agglomeration on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains have relatively high positive correlation characteristics in space, i.e. the habitat quality has high-high agglomeration and low-low agglomeration in space, and with time going by, this trend becomes more and more obvious. In general, the spatial change of habitat quality during the study period was not large. The main reason for the increase was that the implementation of ecological projects changed the type of land use/cover in the region, which increased the suitability of the habitat. However, the main reason for the decline was the expansion of construction land. Therefore, the ecological protection and ecological restoration measures in the study area should be further strengthened.

Key words: InVEST model, Moran index, habitat quality, urban agglomeration on the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains