Assessment of Urban Ecosystem Health Based on Matter Element Analysis: A Case Study of 13 Cities in Jiangsu Province, China

Abstract

Urban public health is an important global issue and receives public concern. The urban ecosystem health (UEH) indicator system was constructed with 27 assessment indicators selected from vigor, organization, resilience, service function, and population health, then the matter element analysis (MEA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) weighting method were used to assess the UEH of each city in Jiangsu Province during the period of 2000–2014. The results show that the overall ecosystem health status of each city shows continuous improvement. The UEH status of each city gradually transferred from poor, general, and medium condition to good and excellent condition. From the perspective of spatial distribution, the city’s UEH showing a steady status after increasing for 10 years, and their spatial variations have gradually reduced. The UEH status in Southern Jiangsu and Central Jiangsu was better than that of Northern Jiangsu Province. From each component point of view, the vigor, resilience, and population health of each city in Jiangsu Province showed a trend of continuous improvement, while the organization and service function first increased and then decreased. The common limiting factors of UEH in Jiangsu Province were Engel’s coefficient of urban households, number of beds of hospitals, health centers per 10,000 people, and total investment in the treatment of environmental pollution as percent GDP. These results help decision makers to make suitable decisions to maintain the UEH of each city in Jiangsu Province.

A Quantitative Assessment of Sustainable Development Based on Relative Resource Carrying Capacity in Jiangsu Province of China

“…Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Jiangsu Province took the second place of China 28 provinces in 2017 [36]. According to differences in economic development, Jiangsu Province is divided into South Jiangsu, Central Jiangsu, and North Jiangsu [37]. The data of population, total water resources, planting area of crops, total energy production, discharge of industrial waste water and total retail sales of consumer goods are derived from the “Statistical Yearbook of China” and “Statistical Yearbook of Jiangsu” from 2001 to 2015 [38].…”

A Review on Ecosystem Health Research: A Visualization Based on CiteSpace

“…Cluster #9, labeled wetland, is also a relatively new cluster. This cluster mostly illustrated health indices, integrated modeling, and the assessment and management of wetlands, including rivers and coastal wetlands [62][63][64][65][66][67][68]. This means that wetlands, a subject that has attracted scholarly attention, have the possibility to become a hot spot for this research area.…”

A Comprehensive Assessment Approach for Water-Soil Environmental Risk during Railway Construction in Ecological Fragile Region Based on AHP and MEA

“…The method was initially proposed by Cai [32] based on the extended set aiming at addressing incompatible problems [33]. Since then, the method has been widely exploited as an assessment method in many research areas, such as ecological evaluation [34][35][36], risk assessment [37][38][39], safety and health assessment [40,41], etc. The reason is that assessments can be viewed as a group multi-rule decision-making problem, and the core processes of the decision-making are incompatible [42].…”

“…By using systematic and structural computation processes of matter-elements, the incompatible problems can be converted into compatible ones [33,43]. AHP can be combined with MEA to construct a synthetic method for multi-tier assessment, i.e., AHP-MEA, and this method integrates the advantages of AHP and MEA and was successfully used in the risk assessment by some researchers [36,44,45].…”