two aspects env indeces might be co nsidered, one is the flux of major elements during the degradation, e.g. C and N, their changes in mass balance and speciation; the other one is how the indegenous microbial diversity changes during the degration, state-of-the -art techniques may be usurd for this purpose, the scale could be at community, cellular, and molecular level depending on the overall research goal.

Thanks Jincai for your effort to help me. What I really is to have an idea about usually used metrics to measure landscape structure and composition when studying insects response to habitat anthropisation. Maybe you can have a good idea in this regard. aspect.