Abstract:
The ecosystem resilience plays a key role in maintaining a steady flow of ecosystem services and enables quick and flexible responses
to climate changes, and maintaining or restoring the ecosystem resilience of forests is a necessary societal adaptation to climate
change; however, there is a great lack of spatially explicit ecosystem resilience assessments. Drawing on principles of the ecosystem
resilience highlighted in the literature, we built on the theory of dissipative structures to develop a conceptual model of the
ecosystem resilience of forests. A hierarchical indicator system was designed with the influencing factors of the forest ecosystem
resilience, including the stand conditions and the ecological memory, which were further disaggregated into specific indicators.
Furthermore, indicator weights were determined with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the coefficient of variation method.
Based on the remote sensing data and forest inventory data and so forth, the resilience index of forests was calculated.The result
suggests that there is significant spatial heterogeneity of the ecosystem resilience of forests, indicating it is feasible to generate large scale
ecosystem resilience maps with this assessment model, and the results can provide a scientific basis for the conservation of
forests, which is of great significance to the climate change mitigation.
