Quantitative Assessment of Forest Ecosystem Integrity and Authenticity Based on Vegetation in Hanma and Huzhong Reserves.

ABSTRACT: Forest ecosystems provide essential ecological functions in the context of accelerating climate change. However, evaluating their conservation values and conditions remains challenging due to conceptual and methodological ambiguities. In particular, ecosystem integrity and ecosystem authenticity are often conflated in vegetation-based assessments, despite representing distinct dimensions of ecosystem condition. This study advances vegetation-based assessments by explicitly decoupling ecosystem integrity from ecosystem authenticity, while integrating spatial completeness, vegetation patterns and quality, and successional-disturbance attributes into a unified operational framework for reserve-level diagnosis and comparison. The resulting indices enable managers to distinguish boundary-driven

SUBMITTER: Wu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12899305 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature