Threat of soil formation rate to health of karst ecosystem

Abstract

Karst ecosystems are important to several billion people, so it is necessary to accurately diagnose and evaluate the health of these ecosystems for socioeconomic development; however, the existing evaluation methods have many limitations, so they cannot accurately evaluate the ecosystem health in karst areas. In particular, they ignore the influence and restriction of the soil formation rate on the ecosystem health. To this end, we established a new index to represent the actual health status of karst ecosystems. The soil formation rate was found to pose a threat to the health of 28 % of the world's karst ecosystems, covering an area of 594 km². In addition, a dataset of global karst ecosystem health index values with a spatial resolution of about 8 km × 8 km from 2000 to 2014 was created, and the proportion of unhealthy areas was found to be as high as 75.91 %. This study highlights the contribution of the soil formation rate to karst ecosystem health and provides a new method and deeper scientific understanding for further accurate evaluation of karst ecosystem health, which can improve future ecosystem health research and social management.

Keywords: Driving factors; Ecosystem health; Global change; Karst ecosystems; Soil formation rate.