Abstract
It is important to protect forest and grassland ecosystems because they are ecologically rich and provide numerous ecosystem services. Upscaling monitoring from local to global scale is imperative in reaching this goal. The SDG Agenda does not include indicators that directly quantify ecosystem health. Remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can bridge the gap for large-scale ecosystem health assessment. We systematically reviewed field-based and remote-based measures of ecosystem health for forests and grasslands, identified the most important ones and provided an overview on remote sensing and GIS-based measures. We included 163 English language studies within terrestrial non-tropical biomes and used a pre-defined classification system to extract ecological stressors and attributes, collected corresponding indicators, measures, and proxy values. We found that the main ecological attributes of each ecosystem contribute differently in the literature, and that almost half of the examined studies used remote sensing to estimate indicators. The major stressor for forests was “climate change”, followed by “insect infestation”; for grasslands it was “grazing”, followed by “climate change”. “Biotic interactions, composition, and structure” was the most important ecological attribute for both ecosystems. “Fire disturbance” was the second most important for forests, while for grasslands it was “soil chemistry and structure”. Less than a fifth of studies used vegetation indices; NDVI was the most common. There are monitoring inconsistencies from the broad range of indicators and measures. Therefore, we recommend a standardized field, GIS, and remote sensing-based approach to monitor ecosystem health and integrity and facilitate land managers and policy-makers.
Highlights
Forests and grasslands, the two major global ecosystems, account for 40.7% of the world’s terrestrial surface [1] and provide a multitude of ecosystem services, such as erosion control, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, raw materials [2], forage provision, habitat, and recreation [3]
We used keywords related to the ecosystems under study, expressions that refer to ecosystem health, variations of words related to indices, terms that are connected to the assessment of ecosystem health, and words related to remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Once we identified the list of ecological indicators, we summarized how remote sensing (RS) techniques can estimate these for the forest and grassland ecosystem
Summary
The two major global ecosystems, account for 40.7% of the world’s terrestrial surface [1] and provide a multitude of ecosystem services, such as erosion control, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, raw materials [2], forage provision, habitat, and recreation [3]. 40% of the remaining forests have high landscape level-integrity [4]. Facilitate monitoring and protection of the ecological conditions of these ecosystems. One of the ecosystem health definitions is “the degree to which the integrity of the soil and the ecological processes of ecosystems are sustained” [6]. Various entities have proposed and used attributes and indicators to conduct EHA (e.g., [7,8,9,10]). Hansen and Phillips [12] developed a Wildland Health
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