A new perspective of ecosystem health

摘要

Ecosystem health has attracted considerable attention from different disciplines in recent years. However, it still remains a disputed issue whether to focus on its general concept or on operational practice. As a result, these disputations have caused confusion and limited further research in the field of ecosystem health. In this paper, we attempt to introduce a new perspective to the concept of ecosystem health. With the aid of modern statistical methodology, such as factor analysis and normal distribution theory, we provide a conceptual approach to the quantitative assessment of ecosystem health and our method could be applied to various categories of ecosystems.