Xu Dandan, Guo Xulin
Department of Geography and Planning, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C8, Canada.
Sensors (Basel). 2015 Jan 29;15(2):3070-89. doi: 10.3390/s150203070.
Grassland ecosystem is one of the largest ecosystems, which naturally occurs on all continents excluding Antarctica and provides both ecological and economic functions. The deterioration of natural grassland has been attracting many grassland researchers to monitor the grassland condition and dynamics for decades. Remote sensing techniques, which are advanced in dealing with the scale constraints of ecological research and provide temporal information, become a powerful approach of grassland ecosystem monitoring. So far, grassland health monitoring studies have mostly focused on different areas, for example, productivity evaluation, classification, vegetation dynamics, livestock carrying capacity, grazing intensity, natural disaster detecting, fire, climate change, coverage assessment and soil erosion. However, the grassland ecosystem is a complex system which is formed by soil, vegetation, wildlife and atmosphere. Thus, it is time to consider the grassland ecosystem as an entity synthetically and establish an integrated grassland health monitoring system to combine different aspects of the complex grassland ecosystem. In this review, current grassland health monitoring methods, including rangeland health assessment, ecosystem health assessment and grassland monitoring by remote sensing from different aspects, are discussed along with the future directions of grassland health assessment.
草原生态系统是最大的生态系统之一,自然存在于除南极洲以外的各大洲,具有生态和经济功能。几十年来,天然草原的退化一直吸引着众多草原研究者监测草原状况和动态。遥感技术在处理生态研究的尺度限制方面具有优势,并能提供时间信息,成为草原生态系统监测的有力手段。到目前为止,草原健康监测研究大多集中在不同领域,例如生产力评估、分类、植被动态、载畜量、放牧强度、自然灾害检测、火灾、气候变化、覆盖度评估和土壤侵蚀。然而,草原生态系统是一个由土壤、植被、野生动物和大气组成的复杂系统。因此,是时候将草原生态系统作为一个整体来综合考虑,并建立一个综合的草原健康监测系统,将复杂草原生态系统的不同方面结合起来。在这篇综述中,讨论了当前的草原健康监测方法,包括从不同方面进行的牧场健康评估、生态系统健康评估和遥感草原监测,以及草原健康评估的未来方向。