A health ecosystem is the aim of building a nice Loess Plateau with green mountain and clear river. This paper, taking Zhifanggou small watershed as an example, by using the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) selecting the woodland and pasture cover, area of fundamental cropland, soil anti-scourability, soil organic matter, output/input, crop yield, net incomes of per capita and benefit of reduci...

An urban ecosystem is a dynamic system. Therefore, regular monitoring through the use of measurable indicators will enable an assessment of performance and effectiveness. This paper presents a conceptual framework to facilitate the development of an inclusive model for the sustainability assessment of green infrastructure. The framework focuses on key interactions between human health, ecosyste...

The ecosystem health concept is an integrative approach to environmental management and while conceptually logical, it is difficult to implement. The false dichotomy of nature and culture, and the way in which knowledge is constructed has led to many of these problems. To understand the relationship between knowledge systems, the ecosystem health concept is explored here by assessing the condit...

Mountain forests, treeline ecotones included, provide numerous ecosystem services. However, different drivers heavily impact the treeline areas, in particular anthropogenic pressure and climate change. Any change affecting the aboveground portion of terrestrial ecosystems automatically influences their belowground part, i.e. soil and soil organisms. Therefore, the focus of the present paper is ...

Directional change in environmental drivers sometimes triggers regime shifts in ecosystems. Theory and experiments suggest that regime shifts can be detected in advance, and perhaps averted, by monitoring resilience indicators such as variance and autocorrelation of key ecosystem variables. However, it is uncertain whether management action prompted by a change in resilience indicators can prev...

This paper examines the way in which biodiversity has been incorporated into the agenda of many international organisations, including non-governmental organisations, and international programmes. Biodiversity has been defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity but is also widely discussed in relation to genetic resources, biodiversity hotspots and ecosystem services. The author identifi...

Regional monitoring and assessments of the health of forested ecosystems require indicators of forest conditions and environmental stresses. Indicator selections depend on objectives and the strategy for data collection and analysis. This paper recommends a set of indicators to signal changes in forest ecosystem distribution, productivity, and disturbance. Additional measurements are recommende...

Catchment and riparian degradation has resulted in declining ecosystem health of streams worldwide. With restoration a priority in many regions, there is an increasing interest in the scale at which land use influences stream ecosystem health. Our goal was to use a substantial data set collected as part of a monitoring program (the Southeast Queensland, Australia, Ecological Health Monitoring P...

a methodology of ecological risk assessment for the terrestrial ecosystem under chronicradioactive pollution of a biotope near a regional radioactive waste storage has been developed in terms of thecritical environmental loads analyzed. it consists of five stages: determination of effect indicators and assessmentof their values; establishment of reference species and indices; assessment and ana...