生态系统健康评价新视角及其应用

A New Perspective of Ecosystem Health and Its Application

对人类生存和发展所依赖的生态系统之健康性的讨论,迄今已引起多个学科的重视。到目前为止,对几乎所有的生态系统类型都各自进行过健康评价。但是,由于生态系统健康研究是一个新领域,有关它的概念、评价等方面存在各种争论,故急需一种更能被普遍接受的、用来定义、分析、评价生态系统健康的理论与方法。论文阐述了生态系统健康的内涵以及评价生态系统健康的基础前提,依据统计学理论,通过因子分析和正态分布理论,提出了评价生态系统健康的一个新视角。最后通过模拟实例对100个生态系统群进行生态系统健康评价,找到了其中不健康的11个生态系统。该方法能通用于各种类型的生态系统健康评价,为生态系统健康的定量分析与评价提供了新的途径。

Ecosystem health has attracted considerable attention from different disciplines in recent years. Until now, nearly all types of ecosystems have been evaluated by the criterion of ecosystem health. However, its definition, analysis and evaluation still remain a disputed issue not only to focus on its general concept but also on operational practice. As a result, these disputations have caused confusion and limited the further research in the field of ecosystem health. In this paper, we attempt to introduce a new perspective to the concept of ecosystem health ; with the aid of modern statistical methodology, such as factor analysis and normal distribution theory, we provide a conceptual approach to the assessment of ecosystem health. By using a simulated dataset, we evaluated 100 ecosystems and found 11 unhealthy ones. We develop a new way to quantitatively analyze and assess ecosystem health and our conceptual framework could be applied to various categories of ecosystems.