区域生态系统健康评价——研究方法与进展

生态系统健康评价是当前宏观生态学与生态系统管理研究的热点问题之一,区域尺度的生态系统健康评价则是生态系统健康评价研究的一个重要发展方向。在探讨生态系统健康时空尺度特征的基础上,明确界定了区域生态系统健康及其评价等相关概念,结合目前区域尺度生态系统健康评价的相关研究进展,从评价的区域类型、目标单元、模型方法、指标选取及其阈值、权重设定等方面探讨了区域生态系统健康评价的基本原理与方法,并展望了进一步研究的重点方向,即评价结果的多尺度综合与尺度转换、景观生态学理论与方法的应用、3S技术的综合应用等理论与技术问题。

Evaluation for regional ecosystem health: methodology and research progress

The evaluation for ecosystem health is one of the hotspots within the fields of macro ecology and ecosystem management.Conducting analysis at the regional scale is an important direction for evaluating ecosystem health.Changing the spatial scale from the local to the regional level leads to great differences in the targets and methodologies for evaluating ecosystem health and creates a new direction for regional ecosystem health research.Compared to ecosystem health at the local scale,which refers to a single ecosystem type,regional ecosystem health focuses on the health conditions and spatial patterns of different ecosystem types.However,there is little attention to this very research.Based on the progress on ecosystem health research at the regional scale,the study reported in this paper aims to discuss the implications of the concept of regional ecosystem health and to put forward a methodology for evaluating regional ecosystem health.The main results are as follows:(1) there is a significant scaling effect on the ecosystem health analysis and the regional level is the key scale used to focus on the correlation between spatially neighboring ecosystems in terms of ecosystem health;(2) regional ecosystem health can be defined through these four aspects,i.e.vigor,organization,resilience,and ecosystem service function;(3) the basic object of the evaluation for regional ecosystem health is spatial entity,which is the matrix of different ecosystem types;(4) the index system method is the only approach for evaluating regional ecosystem health;(5) the absolute thresholds of the evaluation indices for regional ecosystem health do not exist;the aim of the evaluation is to discuss the temporal change and spatial differences of health conditions and not to ascertain whether a region is healthy or not in the view of ecological sustainability;and(6) the integration of results from the evaluation at multi-spatial scales,the application of this methodology to landscape ecology,and the utilization of geographic information systems(GIS),remote sensing(RS),and Global Positioning Systems(GPS) technologies are the main directions for further research.