Abstract: Degradation of damaged ecosystems is a global issue. Identifying the types of damaged ecosystems helps understanding their degradation mechanisms, and furthermore, restoring them with appropriate approaches. Based on the common characteristics after damage, the damaged ecosystems are classified into three types, i.e. structure-damaged, landscape-damaged and mixed types. Structure-damaged and landscape-damaged ecosystems suffer from different effects. Loss of important species (such as keystone species, edificators of communities) and destruction of species relationship play important roles in the degradation of structure-damaged ecosystems. Therefore, conservation and recovery of these species is the key task to restore structure-damaged ecosystems. However, edge effect, island effect and small population effects (such as Allee effect, inbreeding and genetic drift) may play critical roles in the degradation of landscape-damaged ecosystems. To restore such ecosystems, it is important to increase area of fragments, decreas e distance isolation and make links among fragments.

Key words: damaged ecosystem, structure-damaged ecosystem, landscape-damaged ecosystem, consequence