Ecosystem health assessment of Honghu Lake Wetland of China using artificial neural network approach

Abstract

Honghu Lake, located in the southeast of Hubei Province, China, has suffered a severe disturbance during the past few decades. To restore the ecosystem, the Honghu Lake Wetland Protection and Restoration Demonstration Project (HLWPRDP) has been implemented since 2004. A back propagation (BP) artificial neural network (ANN) approach was applied to evaluatinig the ecosystem health of the Honghu Lake wetland. And the effectiveness of the HLWPRDP was also assessed by comparing the ecosystem health before and after the project. Particularly, 12 ecosystem health indices were used as evaluation parameters to establish a set of three-layer BP ANNs. The output is one layer of ecosystem health index. After training and testing the BP ANNs, an optimal model of BP ANNs was selected to assess the ecosystem health of the Honghu Lake wetland. The result indicates that four stages can be identified based on the change of the ecosystem health from 1990 to 2008 and the ecosystem health index ranges from morbidity before the implementation of HLWPRDP (in 2002) to middle health after the implementation of the HLWPRDP (in 2005). It demonstrates that the HLWPRDP is effective and the BP ANN could be used as a tool for the assessment of ecosystem health.