Research Status and Development Trend of Urban Ecosystem Health:A Case Study Based on a Comparison of Chinese and Foreign Literature

TU Xinyi; BI Linglan

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1000-0232.2025.01.010

Abstract：The increasingly prominent issues of the urban ecological environment have attracted growing attention to research into urban ecosystem health.Research progress concerning urban ecosystem health in the Web of Science(WoS)and the CNKI core collection database from 1990 to 2023 were analyzed and reviewed using Citespace and VOSviewer.A total of 504 articles in Chinese and 260 articles in English were collected as the fundamental data for atlas analysis.Results show that(1)researches on urban ecosystem health at home and abroad can be generally divided into three stages through the breakpoint algorithm analysis:the initial stage,the development stage,and the consolidation stage.The earliest literature was published in 1990.The total number of articles fluctuated and increased quickly after 2004.(2)An analysis of the number of articles and cooperative networks of research institutions across the world found that Chinese scholars are the main research force,but there are insufficient collaborative studies with institutions in other countries in term of urban ecosystem health.Hence,more interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborative developments are needed.(3)Foreign research shifts attention from evaluation indicators of ecosystem health to collaborative management of ecosystem health,effects of urbanization on ecosystem health,and ecological restoration.Chinese scholars expanded their study area from a single city to research region and city agglomeration.Moreover,they built an ecological safety network,reestablished the ecological restoration pattern from the national land spatial planning perspective,and explored the spatial and temporal variations of urban ecosystem health.Generally speaking,both Chinese and foreign scholars have begun to pay attention to the social field in addition to the ecological field and promote research and policies on environmental change and human health.(4)Based on the keyword co-occurrence network analysis,it was observed that the research hotspot has gradually shifted from biodiversity,management,evaluation indicators,and frameworks to the urban ecosystem health changes and its driving mechanism under the influence of urbanization-induced land use changes and ecosystem services.(5)Currently,the research techniques in this field are diversified.However,it is difficult to unify definitions of urban ecosystem health because of its interdisciplinary properties.Theoretical studies should be further deepened.The evaluation standards are difficult to quantify accurately,and the urban ecosystem health management must be implemented systematically.Therefore,cooperation with international institutions should be strengthened in future.The research content of domestic and foreign institutions should be compared and analyzed.Moreover,similarities between international and Chinese cities were extracted and limiting factors that influence health development were recognized accurately.Based on the spatial and temporal evolutionary laws of urban ecosystem health conditions,it is a future trend to explore the coupling relationship between urban ecosystem health and urban space and thereby establish a regulation and management strategy framework in the context of territorial spatial planning.Based on technical means like artificial intelligence,it should establish the urban ecosystem health management system with overall consideration to the urban ecosystem,strengthen the construction of ecological engineering and green infrastructure,and realize the benign cycle of sustainable development of urban ecosystem and cities.