Island ecosystem evaluation and sustainable development strategies: A case study of the Zhoushan Archipelago

Island ecosystems are vulnerable and require sustainable development. However, sustainable development of island ecosystems should be based on an accurate evaluation. In this paper, principal component analysis (PCA) was adopted to construct a framework for the evaluation of island ecosystems, followed by the design of sustainable development strategies. The Zhoushan Archipelago in China was used as a case study. First, 15 typical island ecosystem indices were selected to represent five dimensions: climatic, geographical, landscape, social, and biological. According to scores of these five dimensions, islands of the Zhoushan Archipelago were then categorized into three groups: Specially Promoting Islands, Partially Renovating Islands, and Ecologically Controlling Islands. Finally, sustainable development strategies were designed for each island type. This research has an important theoretical contribution because existing studies have previously treated island ecosystems as homogeneous when in fact island ecosystems are heterogeneous. The heterogeneity of islands ecosystems was incorporated into analysis by PCA. The empirical contribution of this study was that, after taking heterogeneity into account, an accurate evaluation of island ecosystems could be obtained to enable the design of targeted sustainable development strategies for different islands.