The Yangtze River Economic Belt(YREB)has been estab-lished since 2015 by the Chinese Government as a strat-egy in regional economic development.Approximately 40％of China's polulatin resides in the YREB aera,and YREB con-tributes more than 40％of the total Gross Domestic Product of China(Chen et al.,2017).With rapid economic growth and urbanization,the YREB has experienced challenges of severe environmental pollution(Ma et al.,2019;Tan et al.,2020;Yuan et al.,2020).Because of the extensively promoted green devel-opment philosophy by the Chinese Government,China's na-tional strategy emphasizes the priority of environmental pro-tection over economic growth(Lu et al.,2019).The ecological quality of the Yangtze River Basin(YRB)is critical to the sus-tainable development of the YREB.However,the construction and the impoundment of cascade dams in the Three Gorges Dam(TGD)in the upper Yangtze has brought some negative impact,including hydrological regime changes and drastic de-creases of river sediments in the middle and lower Yangtze(Guo et al.,2019;Qiu,2011),which cannot be ignored in China's economic development in the future.