Ecology is not only a branch of biology, but also an important part of environmental science and earth system science. The results of ecological studies can be directly applied in biodiversity conservation of plant, animal and microbe, biological resource utilization and biological industry management, and other fields. The concept of ecosystem extends classic ecology or basic ecology research to a new stage of ecosystem ecology or ecosystem science, which has laid a theoretical foundation for the scientific research of ecological environment at the global and continental scales, and has promoted the integration of biology, geography, and environmental science, and cross disciplinary of the natural sciences, humanities, and social economic sciences. During the integration processes, together with constantly absorbing nutrition from different disciplines, researches of eco-logy put forward a lot of scientific concepts or theories, and have been applied and developed in the relevant scientific research, formed contemporary ecology and ecosystem science system centered on the cognition of ecosystem, resource environment, and the mutual feedback relation with human society. We comprehensively discussed the scientific concept, basic theory, and discipline system of contemporary ecology from the origin and development of ecological thought, the scientific connotation, and extension of ecological concept, etc., and tried to sort out, investigate, and analyze the scientific connotation, discipline category and discipline system of contemporary ecology, put forward the branch discipline system classification scheme of basic ecology and applied ecology, with the aim to provide references for perfecting and reconstructing the discipline system of contemporary ecology.

Large-scale terrestrial ecosystem science research becomes an important research field with the promotion of meeting the scientific demand of biodiversity conservation, global climate change mitigation, regional eco-environment governance, and social sustainable development. It is developing rapidly under the guidance of China’s ecological civilization construction strategy. Here, we systematically discussed the missions, theoretical foundation and methodology of large-scale terrestrial ecosystem science research and proposed a new theoretical foundation, conceptual system and logical framework for macroecosystem science research on the basis of macrosystem ecology theory. It elaborated the discipline connotation and application of the macroecosystem science to 1) deve-lop the conceptual network of ecosystem science based on the systematic characteristics of ecosystems; 2) develop the theoretical system of ecosystem state change analysis based on the ecosystem integrity and emergence characteristics; 3) develop the theoretical system of integrated research for ecosystem structure-process-function-service cascade relationship based on the attributes and state of ecosystems. We also discussed the methodology and technical system of regional and continental macroecosystem science research, and highlighted the urgency to construct a new generation of continental ecosystem observation and research network, and to develop the network observation-network experiment-numerical simulation-knowledge fusion four-in-one infrastructures.

Ecosystem management at large scales is one of the core solutions to solve current global challenges of environmental and resources problem, mitigate climate change, govern ecosystems and environments regionally and achieve sustainable development. It is also a hotspot in the research and practice of conservation of global natural resources and ecosystems. Based on recalling and synthesizing of several large international actions on ecosystem management in the past two decades, this article rethought the concept of ecosystem management and its application from the perspective of discipline development of ecosystem management, theoretical fundaments and practices. The content included three parts: firstly, we reviewed the development of the scientific concept and practice of ecosystem management, discussed the connotations of the concept and redefined it, and summarized the practice of ecosystem management and its contribution to the development of the discipline. Secondly, we clarified the scientific and technological mission and basic tasks of ecosystem management, organized the discipline system of ecosystem management and its main research fields, summarized fundamental theories and the knowledge system of the science of ecosystem management, and clarified critical steps of ecosystem management actions, basic elements of management plans and management approaches. Finally, we proposed new trends of scientific research and the discipline development of ecosystem management, discussed the important spatial scales and its objects system of the scientific research on ecosystem management, proposed the cutting-edge scientific questions of global ecosystem management, integrative ecology thought and macro ecosystem approach. This review aimed at providing references for the scientific research and discipline deve-lopment of ecosystem management in China.

Terrestrial ecosystems are the core components of the biosphere, supporting human life, production and social and economic activities. With the development of human civilization and the progress of science and technology, the continued expanding resources utilization in terms of scale and intensity has caused environmental problems, including global climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, resource depletion and ecosystem degradation, which threaten the sustainable development of our society. The public expects ecological research providing scientific theories and systematic solutions for the utilization and protection of ecosystems at the continental and global scale, and the maintenance of sustainable development of human society as well. This study aimed to serve the ecological civilization construction in China, ecological security pattern construction, regional ecological and environmental governance, and the development of macrosystem ecology. We reviewed the effectiveness and experience of regional ecological and environmental governance in China, analyzed the scientific requirements and the characteristics of the times of China’s eco-civilization construction towards large-scale ecological research, and proposed using a new philosophy, i.e., nature-based macroecosystem approach, to improve the ecological and environmental governance and ecological security pattern construction at the regional scale. Based on the above-mentioned expounding, we discussed the strategic plan, technical approaches and technological support system of large-scale ecological security pattern construction and ecological and environmental governance in China. This review could provide theoretical references for safe, healthy and beautiful land spatial construction and the progress of eco-civilization of China.

The urgent requirement of human society to solve major resource and environmental pro-blems at the regional and global scales promotes the rises of macroecosystem science (MES) and the multidisciplinary fusions of natural science and humanities. Furthermore, it facilitates the innovation of macroecosystem scientific theory, as well as the development of continental and global scale knowledge fusion methodology and key technology. With the aim to serve the construction and deve-lopment of continental and global scale knowledge fusion methodological system for the changes of ecosystem status and resource environmental effect studies, we systematically elaborated the multi-disciplinary dimensional basic scientific problems, logic relationships and frontiers in the macroecosystem science, discussed the ideology and content of constructing the continental and global scale research methodological system, proposed to develop the networked observation-networked experiment-numerical simulation-knowledge fusion four-in-one infrastructures. This study would provide theoretical references for the network design of ecosystem observation research in China and at the global scale.

Co-driven by environmental change and human activity, global ecosystem has been experiencing rapid changes, with cascading effects on resources and environment. The changes of ecosystem status and its spatiotemporal evolution drivers, and the related resource and environmental effects have been recognized as the long standing topics of large-scale terrestrial ecosystem science. The coordinated observation networks distributed across different continents and the globe provide the valuable tools for observing and evaluating ecosystem state change, for revealing and elaborating mechanisms underlying ecosystem response, for cognizing and understanding ecosystem evolution, and for predicting and early-warning of ecosystem change. Committing to serving the continental-scale ecosystem science and supporting regional ecological environmental governance, this review first comprehensively analyzed the current status of ecological environment observation research networks, then proposed their development directions. This review advocated to develop a collaborative observation system with characteristics of multi-element, multi-interface, multi-medium, multi-process, multi-scale and multi-method, and to establish the new generation of continental ecosystem observation-experiment research network composed of high technology integration, regional distribution network, network management intellectualization, long-term observation & experiment, multi-functional model simulations, and remote data integration and resource sharing. We elaborated on the function orientation, design philosophy, design scheme, construction objectives and technical system of the research network. We hoped provide references for the development of terrestrial ecosystem observation network in China.

The feedback relationship between organisms or ecosystems and environment has been a key issue in ecological research. Manipulative experiments with changing biological or environmental factors and large-scale field experiment networks were regarded as effective approaches to understand and accurately quantify the process and mechanisms underlying ecosystem response and adaptation to environmental changes. In recent years, a few networks have been developed, including large-scale networks of field physics simulation experiment (i.e., ECOTRON), ecosystem analysis and experiment platform (AnaEE), international Drought Network, Nutrient Network, and experiment networks based on regional ecological observation stations (i.e., USA-ILTER) at global scale. The development of continent-scale experiment network platform is attracting more attention from the academic community, and will play a more important role in understanding the process and mechanism underlying ecosystem responses to environmental change. We reviewed the development of method and experiment system of ecosystem manipulative experiments, and clearly pointed out that different experiments should form a joint collaborative system to answer fundamental scientific questions about the response and adaptation of ecosystem to global environment change. Manipulative experiments could be classified into four types: 1) Physiological and ecological experiments in closed laboratory equipment; 2) semi-open experiments with changing environmental factors in the field; 3) near-natural field experiments; 4) experiment networks based on field ecological station. Furthermore, we discussed the trends in network design of manipulative experiments focusing on ecosystem response and adaptation to environmental changes and the advantages of large-scale experiments based on natural environmental gradients. We put forward a proposal of integrating the technical advantages of different types of experiments and developing a new generation of field experiment network system. The study discussed the research system based on field experiment network, demonstrated the possibility to understand the patterns and mechanisms of the ecosystem short-term response and long-term adaptation to environmental changes, and proposed some equations to quantify the environmental response of ecosystems. The application of the design plan of the manipulative experiments network proposed here will greatly promote the scientific research level of ecosystems and environmental changes in China and even over the whole world, which has important scientific significance for the national response to climate change and ecological environmental construction.

The development of contemporary macroecosystem sciences requires to comprehensively understand the process mechanism and model mechanism of large-scale macroecosystem structure and function, spatial variation, and dynamic evolution, to realize quantitative simulation, scientific assessment, prediction and early warning of ecosystem change and its impacts on human well-being, and to serve the utilization, protection, regulation, and management of ecosystems. Therefore, a new research field of large-scale integrated ecology of macroecosystem science (IEMES) is emerging. Based on the systematic analysis of the basic theories, approaches and key technologies of integrated ecology of macroecosystem science, the following basic understandings have been formed: 1) IEMES takes macroecosystem at regional, continental, and global scales as the research object, and adopts the methods and technologies of multidisciplinary knowledge integration. It is aimed to solve the major resource and environmental problems during the development of human society, such as food security, resource security, ecological security, and environmental security. 2) The basic scientific and technological tasks of IEMES are to understand the basic structural and functional properties of macroecosystem, monitor the changes of ecosystem state, explain the spatiotemporal evolution of ecosystem, uncover the mechanism of ecosystem operation and maintenance process, quantitatively evaluate the functional state and service capacity of ecosystem, predict the dynamic evolution and geographical pattern of ecosystem, provide early warning of ecosystem changes and ecological environmental disasters. 3) It is needed to reconstruct the theory and methodology system of “multi-source data analysis, multi-model simulation, multi-disciplinary knowledge fusion” and develop key technology of multi-disciplinary knowledge fusion of “multi-scale observation, multi-method verification, multi-process fusion, and cross-scale simulation” for IEMES. 4) The continental scale multi-spatiotemporal ecosystem observation and experiment network is the basic scientific and technological facility to carry out deep integration of multi-disciplinary knowledge. It is necessary to develop key technology of multi-disciplinary ecological knowledge integration of multi-factor, multi-process, multi-interface, multi-medium, multi-scale, and multi-method around the regional, continental, and global scale macroecosystem science issues.

More attention has been paid to the monitoring, assessment, prediction, early warning and sustainable management of regional ecological environment and the changes of ecosystem state in recent years. It is an important scientific and technological task to develop quantitative methods and numerical simulation techniques for ecosystem modelling, and to construct the continental scale numerical simulator with the characteristics of multi-process coupling, multi-technology integration, and multi-objective application for stimulating research on ecosystem and global change and its resources, environment and disaster effects, based on the in-depth understanding of the components, processes, functions, patterns, and their interaction mechanism of terrestrial ecosystem. Here, we reviewed the current status and future direction of terrestrial ecosystem models, and discussed the conceptual framework of developing the simulation system of dynamic change and spatial variation in large-scale terrestrial ecosystems and its resource and environment effect, as well as basic issues on the function orientation and structure design of the simulation system, which would provide reference for constructing Chinese terrestrial ecosystem numerical simulator.

Ecological civilization construction and ecological environment governance are basic tasks of state gover-nance in China. China has clearly put forward the goal of improving ecosystem quality and stability. However, there are no consensus on the scientific concept of ecosystem quality and the assessment methods of ecosystem quality evolution, which has puzzled the academic community. Based on the summarization of the scientific concept of ecosystem quality and its evolution, we discussed the concept of ecosystem quality and its ecological theory basis by referencing the concept of production quality, quality management and quality assessment of material production. The scientific connotation of ecosystem quality and its evolution was discussed from the perspectives of ecosystem natural attribute-social attribute-economic attribute and the relationships between them, the cascade relations of ecosystem component-structure-process-function-service-efficacy, the feedback of factor-system-environment, and the logic relation of state ecosystem fluctuation-quantity variation-quality alternation. We proposed perspectives and approaches of multi-objective assessment of ecosystem quality alternation from the aspects of natural resource environment system, typical ecosystem, regional macro-ecosystem, and ecological engineering efficacy.

The carrying capacity of resources and environment is an essential concept in ecology, the theoretical and practical research of which has become an important basis for measuring regional sustainable development. However, the scientific connection between the ecological foundation and the carrying capacity of resources and environment is still unclear. Moreover, it remains unknown which ecological theories played a supporting role in the development of the resources and environment carrying capacity, which makes the scientific concept of carrying capacity very vague. Based on the discussion of the scientific concepts and development of the carrying capacity of resources and environmen, we systematically discussed the basic concepts, such as the niche volume that organisms can occupy, the ecological threshold of ecosystems to withstand environmental stress, the potential resource capacity (supply capacity) of sustainable supply such as climate, water and nutrition, and the environmental capacity of buffering and purifying pollutants. Furthermore, from the biophysical point perspective of foundation pressure bearing capacity, spatial capacity carrying capacity and ecological threshold carrying capacity, the scientific concepts of Natural Resources Supply Carrying Capacity (NRSCC), Nature Environment Carrying Capacity (NECC), Carrying Capacity of Biological Population Development (CCBPD), Carrying Capacity of Social and Economic Development (CCSED) and Carrying Capacity of Environmental Stress in Ecosystems (CCESE) were defined. Finally, three basic issues of ecology were discussed in detail, including the theory of population growth and the ecological capacity of the ecosystem, the theory of ecosystem multi-functionality and resource and environmental effects, and the theory of alternative stable states, self-adaptability, and self-organization. Based on exploring the theory and method of regional resource environmental assessment, this study would provide theoretical basis for regional resource environment utilization, protection and social and economic sustainable development.

Ecosystems provide various environmental conditions and natural resources for life, production, and human livelihoods. Ecosystem management based on natural laws is the basic way for human society to recognize the value of nature and ecosystems, protect and utilize the natural environment and resources, create and accumulate ecological assets, and sustainably develop. Taking that as one of the core concepts, regional ecological economics or economic ecology is becoming a frontier in scientific research to evaluate the Anthropocene earth system and sustainable development. From the perspective of macro-ecosystem science, based on the multi-functionality and multi-values of ecosystems, this study expounded the concepts of natural ecological value, ecological assets, ecological products, and some related phrases, analyzed the processes and principles of formation and change of ecological assets, production and consumption of ecological products, ecological investment, and profit and loss of ecological assets based on integrated ecology, sociology, and economics, proposed paths of regional ecological asset management and ecological value realization. It would provide theoretical and methodological references for the evaluation of regional ecosystem value and ecological assets, and the development of ecological industries and ecological value realization systems.

Improving ecosystem quality and stability is one of the urgent tasks of national ecological environment construction. However, the ecological theory of ecosystem quality and stability has not been well clarified. Based on the summary of influencing factors and interaction between ecosystem quality and stability, we discussed the ecolo-gical theory on the evolution of ecosystem quality and stability from the perspectives of self-organization of biological agglomeration and structure nesting, correlation of ecological elements and coupling of ecological processes, ecosystem integrity and function emergence, ecological service spillover and efficiency tradeoff, synergy and interactions between resource supply capacity and environmental suitability, as well as interactions between spontaneous change and human activities. Technologies approaches and management strategies were proposed from the aspects of ecosystem macro-pattern adjustment, protected natural areas system construction, regional complex ecosystem comprehensive management, degraded ecosystem restoration, damaged ecosystem reestablishment, typical ecosystem process management.

Modern ecology is an analytical method and philosophical concept to solve major resource, environmental and ecological issues encountered during global sustainable development. In the long-term development processes, ecology constantly absorbed and integrated knowledge from related disciplines, forms a system of modern ecology and ecosystem science that closely related to climate system, biological system and socio-economic system, and raises ecosystem principles that directly support the practices of regional ecological restoration and environmental governance. The national needs in the new stage have given ecology a new mission. It is urgently needed to summarize and condense the principles of macro-ecosystems and apply them to regional ecological restoration and environmental governance with the aim to promote the high-quality development of society and economy. Against the background of the multiple severe challenges faced by global sustainable development, we comprehensively elaborated the logics and scientific mission of ecosystem science, organized the principle system of ecosystem science related to ecological restoration and environmental governance, and discussed major academic problems in regional ecological restoration and environmental governance of China. Finally, we emphasized that China has several regional macro-ecosystems of global significances. Conducting theoretical and practical research on macro-ecosystem is not only an urgent need for the construction of ecological civilization, but also the forefront of ecosystem science research, which is expected to make new contributions to theory development of ecology, and global ecological and environmental governance.