Introducing a Method for Ecosystem Health Assessment Based on Remote Sensing Technologies

Widespread impacts of human activities have been the most important environmental issues of the current century that resulted in the loss of major parts of the structures and functions of important ecosystems around the world. This dilemma, clarifies the need to assess and control these destructive trends. Assessment and monitoring of ecosystem health, means a continuous assessment of overall performance, including: monitoring of sustainability and stability of the structure, function and process of the ecosystem and its resilience after the occurrence of a disturbance or stress. Ecosystem health has been recently monitored by establishing quantitative indicators, detecting and monitoring their changes over a long period of time. Current research illustrates how ecological problems ranging from biodiversity loss to land-use change have benefited greatly from advances in geospatial technologies such as GIS and remote sensing, both in the provision of data and access to spatial data analysis tools. This research intend to study and suggest a new method for monitoring and assessing the environmental health by using spatial indicators based on remote sensing and GIS technologies. The result of the study indicates that among the indicators of ecosystem health based on remotely sensed data, land cover maps with suitable temporal resolution and vegetation indices like NDVI and LAI are the most suitable indicators for ecosystem health estimation. This research also suggests the integration of landscape and biodiversity matrixes as well as non-remote sensing indicators (like carrying capacity and environmental loads estimation) are to be proposed indicators in order to estimate ecosystem health with more accuracy.