Department of Geography and Environmental Resources, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901, USA.
Environ Manage. 2012 Aug;50(2):329-40. doi: 10.1007/s00267-012-9873-y. Epub 2012 Jun 9.
Environment functions in various aspects including soil and water conservation, biodiversity and habitats, and landscape aesthetics. Comprehensive assessment of environmental condition is thus a great challenge. The issues include how to assess individual environmental components such as landscape aesthetics and integrate them into an indicator that can comprehensively quantify environmental condition. In this study, a geographic information systems based spatial multi-criteria decision analysis was used to integrate environmental variables and create the indicator. This approach was applied to Fort Riley Military installation in which land condition and its dynamics due to military training activities were assessed. The indicator was derived by integrating soil erosion, water quality, landscape fragmentation, landscape aesthetics, and noise based on the weights from the experts by assessing and ranking the environmental variables in terms of their importance. The results showed that landscape level indicator well quantified the overall environmental condition and its dynamics, while the indicator at level of patch that is defined as a homogeneous area that is different from its surroundings detailed the spatiotemporal variability of environmental condition. The environmental condition was mostly determined by soil erosion, then landscape fragmentation, water quality, landscape aesthetics, and noise. Overall, environmental condition at both landscape and patch levels greatly varied depending on the degree of ground and canopy disturbance and their spatial patterns due to military training activities and being related to slope. It was also determined the environment itself could be recovered quickly once military training was halt or reduced. Thus, this study provided an effective tool for the army land managers to monitor environmental dynamics and plan military training activities. Its limitation lies at that the obtained values of the indicator vary and are subjective to the experts' knowledge and experience. Thus, further advancing this approach is needed by developing a scientific method to derive the weights of environmental variables.
环境在水土保持、生物多样性和栖息地、景观美学等方面发挥着作用。因此，全面评估环境状况是一项巨大的挑战。这些问题包括如何评估景观美学等个别环境组成部分，并将其整合到一个可以全面量化环境状况的指标中。在本研究中，使用基于地理信息系统的空间多准则决策分析来整合环境变量并创建指标。该方法应用于赖利堡军事设施，评估了由于军事训练活动导致的土地状况及其动态。该指标是通过整合土壤侵蚀、水质、景观破碎化、景观美学和噪声等环境变量，并根据专家评估和排名这些环境变量的重要性赋予权重来得出的。结果表明，景观水平指标很好地量化了整体环境状况及其动态，而斑块水平指标（定义为与周围环境不同的同质区域）则详细描述了环境状况的时空变化。环境状况主要由土壤侵蚀决定，其次是景观破碎化、水质、景观美学和噪声。总的来说，由于军事训练活动和与坡度有关的地面和树冠干扰及其空间模式，景观和斑块水平的环境状况差异很大。同时，一旦军事训练停止或减少，环境本身也可以迅速恢复。因此，本研究为陆军土地管理者提供了一种有效的工具，用于监测环境动态并规划军事训练活动。其局限性在于，该指标的获得值会发生变化，并且受到专家知识和经验的影响。因此，需要通过开发一种科学的方法来推导出环境变量的权重来进一步推进该方法。
