Ecotone

The ecotone is a basic landscape unit and one of important components of ecosystem management. Ecotone refers to the overlapping stress area of plant communities determined by climate. It mainly includes three types: local edges or margins, tree line, and biome ecotone. Its generally accepted definition was proposed at the SCOPE (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) conference in Paris, France in 1987, say the interlaced zone between adjacent ecosystems, whose characteristics are determined by the space, time and intensity of the interactions between adjacent ecosystems. Normally an ecotone has seven basic attributes, namely, high species diversity, abundant endemic species, a large number of alien species, frequent material flow, sensitive temporal and spatial dynamics, structural heterogeneity and vulnerability.

Edited and translated by Zhang Yifei