Ecological services provided by natural ecosystems are essential to human survival, while the maintenance of ecosystem services is the basis for regional sustainable development. However, ecological services have not been given enough attention, particularly in recent years in China, where has an accelerated urbanization, with high intensity of human activities. These anthropologic activities have greatly altered its natural ecosystem structure, decreased its ecosystem service functions, and seriously threatened its regional ecological security and sustainable development. In this context, a term of "ecological land", which is of great significance in safeguarding important ecological processes and providing essential ecosystem services, was proposed and gained more and more attention. We thus recognize that an identification and security pattern building of critical ecological land is a crucial way to achieve a win-win of urban ecological protection and smart growth. The research area of this paper is a newly developed area, locating in the western region of the old of Pingdingshan City, Henan Province, with a total area approximately 301.28 km². This region is rich in natural landscape resource and wildlife, with good geological conditions and relatively flat lands. As a major future urban development area in Pingdingshan City, it is necessary to build a comprehensive security pattern for ecological land, which would play a critical role in guiding future urban sustainable development. We firstly utilized a GIS spatial technology and local data base, to analyze three different types of ecological lands based on the single process of water resource security, geological disasters avoidance, biodiversity conservation. Then we overlaid the three different ecological lands and obtained the comprehensive ecological lands, which had been further classified to three types (ideal, buffered and minimum) on the basis of natural break clustering method. Furthermore, we selected the minimum ecological land as source and the land cover as resistance factor, and then applied the minimum cumulative resistance model to build a comprehensive security pattern of critical ecological land. Results showed that the size of minimum ecological land in the newly developed area is 88.44 km², accounting for 29.35% of the total region. The minimum ecological land is not only the core area to maintain natural ecosystem service functions, but also the base line of future urban construction and development. The size of buffered ecological land is 22.28 km², accounting for 7.39% of the total region, mainly including the tidal flat wetland, forest and grassland on the edge of the minimum ecological land. Both the minimum and buffered ecological lands, which are the key ecological lands, with important significance in maintaining key ecological processes, should be protected seriously and developed restrictedly, with an accumulative area being greater than 1/3 of the total region. The size of ideal ecological land is 43.87 km², which is the ideal pattern that maximally protects ecological infrastructures and services, under the premise of meeting the demand of future urban expanding. Furthermore, a number of strategic landscape pattern portions and positions were identified from the security pattern of critical ecological lands, including three-level ecological function zones, ecological corridors among sources, radiating routes between the source and external area, and ecologically strategic points, then the corresponding ecological protection and construction countermeasures were proposed. We believe that the comprehensive security pattern of critical ecological lands, with the advantages of high efficiency and spatial linkage, is an efficiently spatial approach to species conservation and landscape optimization. Therefore, our results could provide scientific reference for urban ecological planning and spatial layout planning for national urban development and future sustainability.