A scientific understanding of the spatio-temporal evolution process and driving factors of water ecological space in the Tibetan Plateau is an urgent requirement to build the “Asian water tower” and establish the coordinated and sustainable development of human-water resources-ecology in the region. In this study, a spatial transformation matrix, spatial correlation analysis, and geographical detector were used to determine the evolutionary characteristics and driving mechanisms of the aquatic ecological space in the Tibetan Plateau from 2000–2020. The following results were obtained:
During the past 20 years, the aquatic ecological space in the Tibetan Plateau has increased by 21.53%. The northwest side of the Hengduan Mountains, the intersection of Tibet and the Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces, “Dari County, Guoluo Prefecture, Qinghai Province-Chayu County, Linzhi City, Tibet Autonomous Region,” had the most significant increase.
The transformation from other ecological space to water ecological space is the dominant change type, and climate warming and human influence have caused glaciers and snowmelt to flow into rivers and lakes. Therefore, water resources in the Tibetan Plateau have melted and water ecological space have been extended eastward.
The evolution of water ecological space in the Tibetan Plateau is jointly driven by many factors, such as policy engineering, natural geography, traffic location, and social economy. Each type of factor had a nonlinearly enhanced interactive driving effect as a whole; this caused the average value of the action intensity q of natural geography and traffic location to be far greater than that of other factors, which is the dominant driving factor for the evolution of the water ecological space in the Tibetan Plateau.