Ecological vulnerability assessment for ecological conservation and environmental management.

Identifying ecological vulnerable regions is a significant aspect in ecological conservation and environmental management. This paper presents a first attempt to provide a prototype framework that can assess ecological vulnerability and evaluate potential impacts of natural, social, economic, environmental pollution, and human health elements on ecological vulnerability with integrating spatial analysis of Geographic Information System (GIS) method and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). A general ecological vulnerability index was constructed to describe the vulnerability status in an ecological hotspot of China. The assessment results of this study confirm the poor ecological vulnerability in China that only 1.32% of the China's population lives in not vulnerable ecosystem. A very high percentage (98.68%) of Chinese with 1.34 billion people lives in vulnerable and highly vulnerable area. This situation is mainly caused by increasing population pressure, exhausted nature resources, extensive economic growth, severe environmental pollution, insufficient environmental protection investment, and accelerating population aging. The spatial comparison indicates that spatial disparity existed in China with the central and northwestern provinces showing higher ecological vulnerability than the northeastern and southern provinces. The results of ecological vulnerability assessment can support effective guidance for mid- or long-term ecologic management. The developed framework can be replicated at different spatial and temporal scales using context-specific datasets to support ecological managers and government with decision-making. With available robust climate change models, future research might incorporate climate change into the ecological vulnerability framework.