Abstract:

Under the background of accelerating global urbanization and environmental change, it is of great significance for ecological risk assessment to identify local ecological elements and processes influencing regional ecological sustainability. Ecological risk assessment has been regarded as one of the key topics in researches on integrated management of social ecological system in the view of physical geography and macro ecology. With a special focus on spatial heterogeneity and the correlations between landscape patterns and ecological processes deriving from landscape ecology, landscape ecological risk assessment (LERA) deepens this topic with a new perspective and paradigm. In this paper, through the contrast among ecological risk assessment, regional ecological risk assessment, and landscape ecological risk assessment, the connotation of LERA is clearly defined. Detailed research progresses on LERA are also discussed and focused on region selection of assessing target, landscape meaning characterization of assessing unit, paradigm uniformity of assessing method, indexation of assessing model, and weight setting of assessing index. Finally, future research prospects on LERA are proposed, including detecting ecological implication in the view of landscape process, applying the scaling concept in risk assessment, quantifying the uncertainty of assessing results, coupling nonlinear ecological model with risk threshold determination, incorporating values of ecosystem services into risk assessment, and integrating multiple ecological models through the identification of source and sink landscape process. A framework has also been constructed to illustrate the logic relationships among the prospects of LERA.

Key words: landscape ecological risk assessment, landscape pattern and process, spatial heterogeneity, research progress and prospect