## 5 Conclusions  
Considering Sichuan Province in southwest China as the study area, we constructed an ESP based on the adjusted ESV, and carried out a priority assessment of ecological corridors by adopting multidisciplinary knowledge, including ecology, physics, and mathematics, to evaluate the importance of ecological corridors to provide connections between ecological sources and their contribution to maintaining overall ecological network connectivity, finally forming a more practical ESP construction framework.  
The results show that Sichuan Province consists of 179 ecological sources of different sizes and a total area of 118,327 km\({}^{2}\), with most resources being concentrated in the middle of the study area. A total of 445 ecological corridors of different lengths are distributed in the east and west sides of the province and are bounded by the Longmen MountainsQionglai Mountains-Daxue Mountains. The main land use types of these landscape elements are woodland and grassland, and fewer resources are available in the eastern part due to the interference of human activities. According to the \"importance-connectivity\" index, the ecological corridors can be divided into four categories: high importance-high connectivity, low importance-high connectivity, high importance-low connectivity, and low importance-low connectivity, with each group comprising 153, 49, 78, and 165 ecological corridors, respectively. The four types of ecological corridors are different in terms of prioritization and method of protection. When implementing environmental protection measures, high-priority corridors should be protected first according to the level of local economic development to obtain a more obvious effect.  
We used a variety of methods to calculate the value of seven kinds of ESs and systematically describe the ecological security in Sichuan Province. As areas with a dense distribution of landscape elements, the Basin Mountain Area, Western Sichuan Alpine Canyon Region, and Southwest Sichuan Mountains Region constitute the cornerstones of the ESP in Sichuan Province. All levels of government need to strengthen environmental monitoring in this region, implement ecological compensation policies, and jointly build a cross-regional ecological protection cooperation mechanism with surrounding provinces and cities to take advantage of the ecological functions in this large area of ecological sources and long ecological corridors. In addition, research on ecological corridors from the perspective of ecological processes expands the existing research direction and deepens the research content from the characteristics of corridors to their ecological function, which can provide a more solid theoretical basis for policymaking. Future studies should explore the protection priority of ecological sources and create a systematic and comprehensive framework for ESP by integrating various landscape elements to improve the feasibility and effectiveness of environmental protection policies and achieve the goal of sustainable development.  
Conceptualization, Z.L. and X.G.; methodology, Z.L.; formal analysis, Z.L.; resources, X.G.; data curation, Z.L. and W.D.; writing--original draft preparation, Z.L.; writing--review and editing, X.G. and Y.H.; project administration, Z.L. and X.G.; funding acquisition, X.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 51108284).  
Not applicable.  
Special thanks to [PERSON] (a graduate of landscape architecture in Sichuan University) for her guidance on data acquisition.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.