Abstract: With the rapid advancement of information and transportation technologies, cross-regional flows of elements have become increasingly frequent, resulting in cross-regional impacts of urbanization on ecosystems. By constructing a regional ecological network using Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA), we assessed the local and telecoupling coordination between urbanization and ecosystem, based on the nodal status of cities within the ecological network. Additionally, a Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) model, combined with the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) method, was employed to analyze the nonlinear effects of urbanization on ecosystems. The results showed that: (1) The impacts of urbanization on ecosystems exhibited significant nonlinear characteristics, with negative effects gradually diminishing as the increases in urbanization levels; (2) Both urbanization and ecological development improvements positively influenced the coupling coordination degree of cities, with a notable threshold effect. For cities with low urbanization levels, priority should be given to promoting socio-economic development while ensuring that the ecological development level does not fall below the minimum threshold; (3) In the Yangtze River Delta region, the local and telecoupling coordination degree of cities was generally lower than the local coupling coordination degree, indicating that current ecological governance policies failed to address cross-regional ecological impacts; (4) Most cities in the Yangtze River Delta exhibited mild discoordination or fair coordination patterns of local and telecoupling coordination. The coordinated cities primarily located in southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang, and the uncoordinated cities mostly found in the northern and western regions of Anhui.

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