Spatiotemporal evaluation of alpine pastoral ecosystem health by using the Basic-Pressure-State-Response Framework: A case study of the Gannan region, northwest China

Abstract

Ecosystem health is the goal of eco-environmental management, and its assessment is necessary for improving regional ecological environments and promoting regional sustainable development. However, previous studies on regional ecosystem health assessment have mainly concentrated on rapidly developing urbanized areas, with very few having been conducted on alpine pastoral regions. Taking the Gannan alpine pastoral region of China as the study area, and based on remote-sensing and GIS technologies, we used entropy methods to calculate the relative weights of several indicators to quantify the uncertainty in the data processing so that the accuracy of the results of the ecosystem health evaluation could be improved. In this study, a new basic-pressure-state-response assessment framework for alpine pastoral ecosystem health assessment is proposed, based on the pressure-state-response. It was found that the levels of ecosystem health of the Gannan pastoral had a spatial distribution pattern that decreased from southwest to northeast, from 2000 to 2015. Notably, the areas of the well and weak health showed a decreasing trend, with more regions tending toward ordinary levels. Among all the assessing indicators, the average value of the pressure indicator was the greatest, with the basic indicator value being the lowest. Our assessment results could be used as a guide for eco-environment managers tasked with taking effective measures to improve the status of the ecosystem health in alpine pastoral regions.

Keywords

• Basic-Pressure-State-Response (BPSR) framework
• Entropy method
• Ecosystem health
• Remote sensing (RS)
• Geographic information system (GIS)