An ecological based sustainability assessing system for cropping system

The assessment of sustainability in cropping system is an important issue for natural resources management and environmental protection. Incorporating the geographical information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) technologies, an initial idea of the crop sustainability assessing system was thus proposed, based on ecosystem services value (ESV) assessing criterions. The system is basically constituted by two major parts, which were net primary production (NPP) based ESV evaluating system and universal soil loss equation (USLE) based conserving soil and water (CSW) evaluating system. The input datasets includes temporal moderate resolution satellite images (HJ-CCD), Meteorological data, DEM data and soil data. To test the efficiency of the proposed system, an assessment was thus conducted along the Huai river watershed. The results showed that the value of sustainability for the study areawas 40.89×104 yuan/m2 in average. Besides, a descending trend of sustainable value was found along the watershed from the outer region to center. Moreover, it was pointed out that the agroecosystem provided more value or services in feeding people than in maintaining the sustainability of the environment, comparing with the other ecosystem, such as forests and wetlands. Thereby, it is recommended to maintain or increase the ecosystem diversity in a place, which would be able to enhance the sustainability of it. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.