A Bi-layer Model LPA-RRM To Evaluate Port Ecosystem Risk

With the prosperity of marine industry, port and its adjacent waters have become the high-risk areas of contamination and environmental pollution. A great many accidents of oil and other chemical split have been reported. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a more effective method to measure and evaluate the ecological risk in port, which will provide a ground foundation for the risk management in following process.Based on the characteristics of port ecosystem, a comprehensive method in risk recognition and evaluation is proposed in this paper. The contents and findings are listed as below:1. On recognition of port ecosystem characteristicsPort ecosystem counts in 3 aspects, namely natural ecosystem, artificial ecosystem and compound ecosystem. On natural ecosystem, it is characterized by the properties of high productivity, great gradient change and extreme vulnerability. On artificial ecosystem, it is very open, whereas its anti-interference ability and self-adjusting ability is rather poor. On compound ecosystem, it has a reversed direction of evolution and a developing degree of opening compared with that of natural ecosystem.2. On the bi-layer model LPA-RRM established to evaluate port ecosystem riskBased on ports’ characteristics of distribution and the ecosystem, a bi-layer model LPA-RRM is proposed in this paper, which is the first attempt to make a combination of landscape pattern analysis (LPA) and relative risk model (RRM) in the field of port ecosystem research.3. On port ecosystem risk evaluation in DalianWith the help of LPA, Changxingdao district is identified as the high-risk area of ecological crisis among all the ports in Dalian in the upper layer of evaluation. In the following part, with the lower layer evaluation method RRM, an in-depth study of the risk mechanism in Changxingdao is made. Based on the planning data, it is predicted that North Shore of Xizhongdao will experience the highest risk, site construction and vessels’transportation are the major risk sources, risk level in nearshore water is higher than that in wetland or on land and biological species is the main risk receptor.