Ecosystem Health Assessment in Inner Mongolia Region Based on Remote Sensing and Gis

Ecosystem health is an important index of the regional sustainable development. In view of the singularity of indicator selection caused by the limited application of remote sensing and GIS at present, this paper took the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model as reference, and revised the model in multi-analysis foundation. The pressure, vigor, organization structure, response and resilience were selected as the indicators of ecosystem health. This study distilled the vegetation index, image interpretation, change detection by remote sensing and GIS. The comprehensive assessment factors were developed with the integration of the social economic and demographic data, and some concepts of landscape ecology were introduced in this process. Finally, we analyzed the ecosystem health in Ordos area through ecosystem structure analysis, human footprint effect analysis, response analysis, resilience analysis, indicators extraction and system health assessment. * Correspondence Author: Wen Wang. Address: School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, No.59 Zhongguancun Street, Beijing 100872, China. Email: [email protected], Phone: 86-10-64870453 1. INTRODCUTION Nowadays, with serious contamination and deterioration of global environment, regional ecosystem health has been concerned a lot and become an important index of regional sustainable development. The concept of ecosystem health was first developed as an ecological system which is healthy and free from ‘distress syndrome’ if it is stable and sustainable (Rapport, 1989; Rapport, 1999). And with the development of ecology, the concept of ecosystem health has been expanded to a comprehensive conception of ecology, economy and population. Rapport (Rapport, 1989; Rapport, 1999) considered ecosystem would include two parts: meeting the reasonable needs of humankind and maintaining the organization of itself. In this paper we propose a healthy ecosystem is the one that has the ability to maintain its structure (organization), function (vigor) and landscape level over time in the face of external stress (resilient) (Costanza, et al. 1999), also it is not threatening to the other surrounding ecosystem and could keep humankind and other organic coenosis healthy. At present, studies on ecosystem health mainly focus on the integration with other ecological theories, such as the assessment of regional ecosystem health using remote sensing and GIS. Based on remote sensing and GIS, the health assessment of grassland ecosystem (Chen, et al. 2005), lake ecosystem (Xu, et al. 2005), coastal ecosystem (Tamara, et at. 2004), river ecosystem (Wu, et al. 2007), city ecosystem (Liu, et al. 2006) were developed. Presently, although the study of ecosystem health steps towards modeling and quantifying, there are some problems about establishment of assessment system, choice and singularity of evaluating indicators, which need to be further discussed. 2. DATA USED