A Risk Assessment Approach of World Heritage Sites Based on RS and GIS: —the cases studies of Mount Emei

Abstract

World Heritage Sites(WHS) are threatened by various anthropogenic factors and natural disasters. Ecological risk assessment (ERA) is an essential tool for the systematic monitoring of WHS and the crucial first step towards effective risk management. Toward this direction, taking Mount Emei as the study area, this paper combines the land-cover data, DEM, and remote sensing data to access the ecological risk from both aspects of natural disasters and human disturbances. Natural disasters adopt the traditional factor weighting method and then use landscape pattern index to construct a landscape disturbance index to measure human disturbances. According to the proposed approach, the ecological risk of each risk cell is obtained. The ecological risk value is classified, and finally, the spatial distribution of the ecological risk in Mount Emei is obtained. The results show that the comprehensive ecological risk of Mount Emei is relatively small and the major influencing factor is natural disasters.