Spatially Explicit Assessment of Ecosystem Resilience: An Approach to Adapt to Climate Changes

The ecosystem resilience plays a key role in maintaining a steady flow of ecosystem services and enables quick and flexible responses to climate changes, and maintaining or restoring the ecosystem resilience of forests is a necessary societal adaptation to climate change; however, there is a great l...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advances in Meteorology 2014-01, Vol.2014 (2014), p.1-9-0109
Main Authors: Yan, Haiming, Zhan, Jinyan, Liu, Bing, Huang, Wei, Li, Zhihui
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analytic hierarchy process
Assessments
Climate change
Climatic changes
Ecological balance
Ecosystems
Emissions
Environmental aspects
Forest ecology
Forest management
Forests
Geospatial data
Hypotheses
Indicators
Resilience
Social aspects
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Summary:The ecosystem resilience plays a key role in maintaining a steady flow of ecosystem services and enables quick and flexible responses to climate changes, and maintaining or restoring the ecosystem resilience of forests is a necessary societal adaptation to climate change; however, there is a great lack of spatially explicit ecosystem resilience assessments. Drawing on principles of the ecosystem resilience highlighted in the literature, we built on the theory of dissipative structures to develop a conceptual model of the ecosystem resilience of forests. A hierarchical indicator system was designed with the influencing factors of the forest ecosystem resilience, including the stand conditions and the ecological memory, which were further disaggregated into specific indicators. Furthermore, indicator weights were determined with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the coefficient of variation method. Based on the remote sensing data and forest inventory data and so forth, the resilience index of forests was calculated. The result suggests that there is significant spatial heterogeneity of the ecosystem resilience of forests, indicating it is feasible to generate large-scale ecosystem resilience maps with this assessment model, and the results can provide a scientific basis for the conservation of forests, which is of great significance to the climate change mitigation.
ISSN:1687-9309
1687-9317
DOI:10.1155/2014/798428