Abstract
To meet the global challenges of climate change and human activity pressure on biodiversity conservation, it has become vital to map such pressure hotspots. Large areas, such as nation-wide regions, are difficult to map from the point of view of the resources needed for such mapping (human resources, hard and soft resources). European biodiversity policies have focused on restoring degraded ecosystems by at least 10% by 2020, and new policies aim to restore up to 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. In this study, methods developed and applied for the assessment of the degradation state of the ecosystems in a semi-automatic manner for the entire Romanian territory (238,391 km2) are presented. The following ecosystems were analyzed: forestry, grassland, rivers, lakes, caves and coastal areas. The information and data covering all the ecoregions of the Romania (~110,000 km2) were analyzed and processed, based on GIS and remote sensing techniques. The largest degraded areas were identified within the coastal area (49.80%), grassland ecosystems (38.59%) and the cave ecosystems (2.66%), while 27.64% of rivers ecosystems were degraded, followed by 8.52% of forest ecosystems, and 14.05% of lakes ecosystems. This analysis can contribute to better definition of the locations of the most affected areas, which will yield a useful spatial representation for future ecological reconstruction strategy.
Highlights
The evaluation of the state of ecosystems, as the fundamental structural and functional unit of living matter, is a constant concern of global and European policies, in order to establish guidelines for preventing the loss of their functions
The integration of each Romanian ecosystem type assessment indicated that the coastal ecosystem is the most degraded ecosystem, with 86.55% degraded area (1362.32 km2 )
Identifying degraded ecosystems is a key element of ecological the ecological reconstruction
Summary
The evaluation of the state of ecosystems, as the fundamental structural and functional unit of living matter, is a constant concern of global and European policies, in order to establish guidelines for preventing the loss of their functions. Natural ecosystems are constantly exposed to pressures from over-exploitation of resources, extensive hunting, climate change and pollution [1,2]. Some authors consider that the highest direct impact on an ecosystem’s state is represented by anthropogenic pressures (overharvesting and land use change) leading to biodiversity loss [3]. To accurately evaluate the ecosystem services provided by a particular area, first, the state of the ecosystem must be studied. The state of the ecosystem is the first level in the flow of services from nature to society [4], and it defines the ability of the ecosystem to
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