Evaluation for regional ecosystem health: methodology and research progress

The evaluation for ecosystem health is one of the hotspots in 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 targets and methodologies for ecosystem health evaluation and creates a new direction for regional ecosystem health research. Compared with the ecosystem health at the local scale, which refers to a single ecosystem type, the regional ecosystem health focuses on the health conditions and spatial patterns of different ecosystem types. However, there has been little attention paid to this very research up to now. Based on the progress on ecosystem health studies at the regional scale, the study reported in this article aims to discuss the implications of the conception of regional ecosystem health and to put forward a methodology for evaluating the regional ecosystem health. The main results include: (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 4 aspects, i.e., vigor, organization, resilience, and ecosystem service functions; (3) the basic evaluation objects of the regional ecosystem health is spatial entity, which is the matrix of different ecosystem types; (4) indicator system method is the only approach to evaluate regional ecosystem health; (5) the absolute thresholds of the evaluation indicators for the regional ecosystem health do not exist; the aim of the evaluation is to discuss the temporal dynamic changes and spatial differences of health conditions rather than to ascertain whether a region is healthy or not in view of ecological sustainability; and (6) the integration of evaluation results at multispatial scales, the application of this methodology in the 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.