[Academic] Methods of assessing regional ecosystem health

Ecosystem Health and Its Measurement at Landscape Scale: Toward the Next Generation of Quantitative Assessments

Seven tools and concepts can be used to assess regional ecosystem health: 1. the concept of ecosystem health; 2. innovative stochastic techniques for representing human disturbance and ecosystem response in landscapes, and the corresponding statistical tools for analyzing them; 3. representation of spatial biocomplexity; 4. innovative combination techniques of upper-echelon-based spatial scan statistic to detect, delineate, and prioritize critical study areas for evaluating and prioritizing causal factors and effects; 5. the capability of comparing and prioritizing a collection of entities in light of multiple criteria, using poset mathematics of partial order with rank frequency statistics, to provide multicriterion decision support; 6. extending data mining and visualization techniques to determine associations between geospatial patterns and ecosystem degradation at landscape scales; 7. comprehensive studies conducted on different types of regional ecosystems.

The challenge is to characterize, evaluate, and validate linkages between socioeconomic drivers, biogeochemical indicators, multiscale landscape pattern metrics, and quality of human life indicators.

Regional Vulnerability: A Conceptual Framework

It suggests that to conduct an integrated assessment on a regional ecosystem, we must use synergistic methods. Synergy is too difficult to measure now and too important to ignore. We can use vulnerablility as a middld-road means to assess health situation of a regional ecosystem.