Abstract

Urban ecological resilience (UER) has become a central concern in rapidly urbanizing regions where development pressures increasingly interact with ecological constraints. Focusing on the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration (GPUA), a semi-arid urban agglomeration in western China, this study examines the non-static and locally heterogeneous drivers of UER across 11 prefecture-level cities from 2000 to 2023. UER is measured through resistance, adaptability, and recovery. An extended STIRPAT model, Elastic Net with stability selection, two-way fixed-effects period interactions, and Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) are integrated to identify robust drivers, test post-2011 shifts, and estimate city-year local associations. Residual Moran’s I diagnostics and Spatial Lag GTWR (SLM-GTWR) are used as supplementary checks. The results show that UER remains relatively stable at the aggregate regional level but becomes increasingly divergent across cities. Ten robust drivers are retained, with fiscal investment intensity, human capital, medical and health level, and total energy consumption emerging as key variables. Period heterogeneity results indicate that fiscal investment becomes more favorably associated with UER after 2011, while the marginal association of energy consumption weakens. GTWR reveals clear local heterogeneity: human capital shows the most stable positive association, medical and health level remains generally negative, fiscal investment is positive but context-dependent, and energy consumption is predominantly negative but locally differentiated. Supplementary spatial diagnostics suggest that the GTWR specification captures the main spatiotemporal structure of UER, while spatial-lag checks broadly support the robustness of the local coefficient patterns, although estimates of spatial interaction remain sensitive to how inter-city linkages are defined. These findings indicate that UER drivers are dynamic rather than fixed, with resilience formation shaped mainly by governance-regime shifts and localized heterogeneity. The study contributes a sequential screening–heterogeneity framework for identifying non-static resilience drivers and suggests that resilience governance should combine stage-sensitive policy adjustment, place-based intervention, and regional coordination where ecological functions and environmental risks cross administrative boundaries.

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