State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
Sci Total Environ. 2010 May 15;408(12):2425-34. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2010.03.009. Epub 2010 Mar 26.
Due to the important role of cities for regional, national, and international economic development and the concurrent degradation of the urban environmental quality under rapid urbanization, a systematic diagnosis of urban ecosystem health for sustainable ecological management is urgently needed. This paper reviews the related research on urban ecosystem health assessment, beginning from the inception of urban ecosystem health concerns propelled by the development needs of urban ecosystems and the advances in ecosystem health research. Concepts, standards, indicators, models, and case studies are introduced and discussed. Urban ecosystem health considers the integration of ecological, economic, social and human health factors, and as such it is a value-driven concept which is strongly influenced by human perceptions. There is not an absolute urban ecosystem standard because of the uncertainty caused by the changing human needs, targets, and expectation of urban ecosystem over time; thus, suitable approaches are still needed to establish health standards of urban ecosystems. Several conceptual models and suitable indicator frameworks have been proposed to organize the multiple factors to represent comprehensively the health characteristics of an urban ecosystem, while certain mathematical methods have been applied to deal with the indicator information to get a clear assessment of the urban ecosystem health status. Instead of perceiving the urban ecosystem assessment as an instantaneous measurement of the health state, it is suggested to conceptualize the urban ecosystem health as a process, which impels us to focus more studies on the dynamic trends of health status and projecting possible development scenarios.
由于城市在区域、国家和国际经济发展中的重要作用，以及在快速城市化进程中城市环境质量的同时恶化，迫切需要对城市生态系统健康进行系统诊断，以实现可持续的生态管理。本文从城市生态系统发展需求引发的城市生态系统健康关注以及生态系统健康研究进展出发，综述了城市生态系统健康评估的相关研究。介绍和讨论了概念、标准、指标、模型和案例研究。城市生态系统健康考虑了生态、经济、社会和人类健康因素的综合，因此它是一个受人类感知强烈影响的价值驱动概念。由于人类对城市生态系统的需求、目标和期望随时间不断变化而导致的不确定性，不存在绝对的城市生态系统标准；因此，仍需要合适的方法来建立城市生态系统的健康标准。已经提出了几个概念模型和合适的指标框架，以组织多个因素，全面代表城市生态系统的健康特征，同时应用某些数学方法来处理指标信息，以明确评估城市生态系统的健康状况。建议将城市生态系统评估不仅仅视为对健康状态的瞬时测量，而是将其概念化为一个过程，这促使我们更加关注健康状况的动态趋势，并预测可能的发展情景。
