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Geospatial assessment of agroecosystem health: development of an integrated index based on catastrophe theory

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Abstract

Assessing agroecosystem health at landscape scale has been rarely reported. A geospatial assessment framework, by integrating remote sensing, geographical information systems, landscape metrics, geostatistics and catastrophe theory, was proposed and applied to characterize the spatial variations of agroecosystem health for a typical region in the eastern coastal agricultural plain, China. After appropriate pretreatments, eleven hierarchically structured indicators, subject to catastrophe models, were aggregated into an integrated index for each 30 m grid cell across the study area. Great spatial variations in agroecosystem health were identified. Areas covered by water bodies and impervious surfaces, under which soils can not function, generally presented low values. Larger slope or higher heavy metal polluted areas and those near roads showed low or moderate values of agroecosystem health index. Concerning the spatial variations of agroecosystems health, patches of approximately 4 km in diameter were identified, within which more homogenous patterns would be expected. Specifically, the spatial variations of agroecosystems health should be resulted from the location-specific coupled influences of the underlying indicators. The integrated agroecosystem health index is believed to be helpful for managers to promote environmental management. The geospatial assessment framework reported in this paper was simple and operational, and has potential to be applicable to other areas with similar conditions at landscape scale.

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Acknowledgments

We thank editor-in-chief George Christakos for handling our manuscript and two anonymous reviewers for providing useful suggestions. This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology Grant and State Scholarship Fund (No. 2011632110).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Environmental Remediation and Ecosystem Health, College of Environment and Natural Resources, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Shiliang Su, Zhonghao Zhang, Rui Xiao, Zhenlan Jiang, Tao Chen & Jiaping Wu

  2. Fertilizer and Plant Protection Service of Haining City, Haining, China

    Limin Zhang

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  1. Shiliang Su
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  2. Zhonghao Zhang
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  3. Rui Xiao
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  4. Zhenlan Jiang
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  5. Tao Chen
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  6. Limin Zhang
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  7. Jiaping Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiaping Wu.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary data The whole calculation process and produced maps of each step were provided for readers’ convenience.

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Supplementary material 1 (DOC 2802 kb)

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Su, S., Zhang, Z., Xiao, R. et al. Geospatial assessment of agroecosystem health: development of an integrated index based on catastrophe theory. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 26, 321–334 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-011-0551-z

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