| Forest ecosystem management concept has been proposed for decades, but there is no scientific conclusion about how to effectively use and manage forest ecosystem. The good first step in forest ecosystem management should be an objective assessment on forest ecosystem and the continuous improvement and optimization of management decision-making with the assessment results for reference. At present, many studies of assessment of forest ecosystems mainly focused on ecological security and the assessment of ecosystem function or structure of the internal microstructure. There is no assessment based on the macro-level system, which separates the system's characteristics.It is confirmed that the state of ecosystem integrity should includes the most important objective nature of forest ecosystems, that is, the integrity of system structure and function by the analysis of the theory system and relevant literature. This paper analyzed the characteristics of the forest ecosystem structure and function and put forward: the changes of the forest ecosystem structure and function were affected by human disturbances in large. Therefore, building the evaluation system should pay attention to the impacting which human disturbance pressure on the system and make objective and comprehensive quantitative evaluation on forest ecosystems from a macro perspective. This paper took the mature theory of "state-pressure-response" (PSR) framework and selected the indicators in forest ecosystem structure and function perspective. The study established the assessment system and proposes the assessment model by summarizing the previous selection and quantitative methods of indicators. The model took the comprehensive index method:The indicators took the scores by the expert score, and then figured out the indicators'weights by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The study got the pressure, state and response layer sub-index, then got the comprehensive evaluation indexes by weighted-average method to calculate layer sub-index.The study connected with the empirical study with Hanshou County, Hunan Province as the study area. The basic data was obtained scientifically and efficiently, the consistency of time data and indicators were emphasized, and the vector information of the landscape patterns was extracted by Geographic Information System. The study took the national standards and previous research results in the quantitative analysis of the basic data, which provided guarantee for the scientificity of assessment indicators. The article finally circumscribed the evaluation level limits, divided the integrity of forest ecosystems into five grades, and came to the comprehensive evaluation index of 2.7588 with Hanshou County which is in "incomplete" status. The study pointed out five significant impacted indicators:forest mosaic degree, patch shape fragmentation, forest products consumption, population density, and solid-state pollutant discharge, which provided the decision-making for forest ecosystem management in Hanshou County. This empirical study made the evaluation work to constantly adjust and revised to perfect.From the perspective of ecosystem integrity, this paper studied on the macro-level evaluation of the forest ecosystem and established the system and modle of index evaluation contained nine elements, twenty-seven indicators in all, for forest ecosystem management reference, which was the bold innovation for studying the assessment of forest ecosystem. The results showed that applying integrity of ecological systems theory to evaluate forest ecosystems was an effective evaluation method. It not only objectively analyzed the forest ecosystem in system level but also pointed out the influence degree of each indicator in forest ecosystems. It provided a data reference and decision support for forest ecosystem management. Since the relatively studies in china are still in shortage, the theory is not yet mature, and needs to be deepened. |
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