Urban Ecosystem Health Assessment: Perspectives and Chinese Practice

Meirong Su,Gengyuan Liu,Linyu Xu,Yan Zhang,Lixiao Zhang,Zhifeng Yang

doi:10.3390/ijerph10115874

Abstract

The concept of ecosystem health is a way to assess the holistic operations and development potential of urban ecosystems. Accelerated by the practical need for integrated ecosystem management, assessment of urban ecosystem health has been greatly developed and extensively applied in urban planning and management. Development is aimed at comprehensively evaluating the performance of urban ecosystems, identifying the limiting factors, and providing suggestions for urban regulation. The time has come for reviewing and establishing an instructional framework for urban ecosystem health assessment to shed light on certain essential issues of urban ecosystem health. Based on literature reviews and series of practice, a holistic framework of urban ecosystem health assessment is proposed. The framework covers the essential elements of urban ecosystem health and integrates three dimensions: theoretical foundation, assessment method, and practical application. Concrete assessment methods are also established, focusing on both external performance and internal metabolic processes. The practice of urban ecosystem health assessment in China is illustrated to briefly demonstrate the application of the established framework and methods. Some prospects are discussed for urban ecosystem health assessment and its application in urban planning and management.

Highlights

As a socioeconomic-ecological complex system [1], an urban ecosystem consists of residents and their environment in certain time and space scales, in which, ecologically-speaking, consumers are the dominant component lacking producers and decomposers [2]
The findings are extensive, and three examples are provided below to illustrate the significance of these findings: (1) Spatial distribution rule of the level of urban ecosystem health for Chinese cities
Problems include how to: (1) build a holistic conceptual model to systematically organize multiple factors, (2) establish a reasonable health standard, (3) improve the objectivity of assessment results, and (4) make the assessment results more constructive for practical urban management

Summary

Introduction

As a socioeconomic-ecological complex system [1], an urban ecosystem consists of residents and their environment in certain time and space scales, in which, ecologically-speaking, consumers are the dominant component lacking producers and decomposers [2]. When the ecosystem stress is within the ecosystem’s regenerative capacity, it can self-restore. Disturbed by various visible environmental problems such as water shortage, air pollution, and land degradation, there is concern about whether the urban ecosystem can operate sufficiently well to support dense population, provide sustainable services, and maintain good environmental quality. Urban ecosystem health-combining the urban ecosystem’s ability to maintain its own renewal and self-generative capacity and satisfy reasonable demand from human society became a scientific topic [2] and was greatly driven by the extensive public concerns and decades of progress in ecosystem health research [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]

Methods

Results

Conclusion