Developing robust ecological networks (ENs) is critical for sustaining ecosystem function and biodiversity in the ecologically vulnerable Loess Hills of the Central Yellow River Basin—a region increasingly fragmented by intensive agriculture and infrastructure expansion. Conventional methods for identifying ecological sources often depend on weighted overlays of ecosystem services (ESs), introducing subjectivity and limiting replicability. To address this, the present study combines a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) neural clustering model with comp...
