Forest Ecosystem Health Assessment

Since the beginning of 20th century, forest ecosystem has been changed byhuman activities with unprecedented scale and speed. Due to disafforestation,overgrazing and air pollution, forest area has dwindled rapidly and forest ecosystemhas degraded badly, therefore forest ecosystem destruction has become one of themost serious ecological environmental problems all over the world. Forest ecosystemhealth is receiving attention from the whole world and its assessment has become acommon and useful technique to diagnose the turbulence in its structure and functioncaused by human activities or natural factors. Although forest ecosystem healthassessment has become a research hotspot, it's still a new field that many aspects areunder exploring and the academia also has various opinions about its concepts, theoryand method.Based on other people' research, this paper discussed some relevant theory andmethods under the theme of forest ecosystem health assessment and made a casestudy in the end. An index system of four grades for forest ecosystem healthassessment was constructed and 22 indices were chosen from natural, social andeconomic fields. Then the standard for forest ecosystem health assessment wasdecided. At last, using analytic hierarchy process and multi-level fuzzycomprehensive evaluation, the forest ecosystem health of Gudou Moutain NaturalReserve was assessed in natural, social and economic fields. The results indicatedthat:(1) As the standard for forest ecosystem health assessment was constructed basedon current data from Dinghu Moutain Natural Reserve and Shimentai Natural Reserve,it applied well to semi-tropical evergreen broadleaf forest.(2) The rank of general forest ecosystem health of Gudou Moutain NaturalReserve was 2.619, located between gradeâ…¡and gradeâ…¢and more close to gradeâ…¢, indicating the forest ecosystem heath was deteriorating from health towardssubhealth. The health rank of natural component in forest ecosystem of GudouMoutain Natural Reserve was 2.38, more close to gradeâ…¡, showing that the naturalecological environment suffered little destruction from human beings. The health rankof social component in forest ecosystem of Gudou Moutain Natural Reserve was 2.79,more close to gradeâ…¢, showing that the forest ecosystem was disturbed lightly byhuman activity. The heath rank of economic component in forest ecosystem of GudouMoutain Natural Reserve was 3, belonging to subhealth. The health rank of different elements in forest ecosystem fluctuated between two ranks, while health of populationdevelopment was the best and health of city development was the worst.(3) According to the assessment results, some measures should be taken toimprove the forest ecosystem health of Gudou Mountain Natural Resreve, includingincreasing biologic diversity, protecting the rare animals and plants, constructingmonitor system for forest ecosystem, developing forest tourism, increasing theproportion of semi-tropical evergreen broadleaf forest to rebuild forest physiognomy,conducting scientific research and improving the quality of ecological public welfareforest, and so on.