Tales from a thousand and one ways to integrate marine ecosystem components when assessing the environmental status
By Á. Borja, T. Prins, N. Simboura, J. Andersen, Torsten Berg, Joao Marques, J. Neto, N. Papadopoulou, J. Reker, H. Teixeira and 1 more. Frontiers in Marine Science, 2014
111 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Assessing the environmental status of marine ecosystems is useful when communicating key messages to policymakers or the society, reducing the complex information of the multiple ecosystem and biodiversity components and their important spatial and temporal variability into manageable units. Taking into account the ecosystem components to be addressed (e.g. biological, chemical, physical), the numerous biodiversity elements to be assessed (e.g. from microbes to sea mammals), the different indicators needed to be studied (e.g. in Europe, 56 indicators of status have been selected), and the different assessment scales to be undertaken (e.g. from local to regional sea scale), some criteria to define spatial scales and some guidance on aggregating and integrating information is needed. We have reviewed, from ecological and management perspectives, the approaches for aggregating and integrating currently available for marine status assessment in Europe and other regions of the world. Advantages and shortcomings of the different alternatives are highlighted. We provide some guidance on the steps towards defining rules for aggregation and integration of information at multiple levels of ecosystem organization, providing recommendations on when using specific rules in the assessment. A main conclusion is that any integration principle used should be ecologically-relevant, transparent and well documented, in order to make it comparable across different geographic regions.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c09c5c33b46a64267dcc7cdfe2b0f5f79bcb546a
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In Global and Planetary Change
- Á. Borja
- Graciela I. Metternicht
- Martine Maron
- Neville D. Crossman
- C. Lynam
- A. Cowie
- I. Muxika
- J. Bald
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- A Catalogue of Marine Biodiversity Indicators (2016, background): “…knowledge from different ecosystem aspects has recently grown with the overall acceptance of the Ecosystem Based Management Approach, and has led to several proposals and recommendations on best practices to integrate multiple indicators and assessment scales (review by Borja et al., 2014).”
- DNA Sequencing as a Tool to Monitor Marine Ecological Status (2017, unknown): “However, harmonization is challenging (Simboura et al., 2005; Borja et al., 2014).”
- Land in balance: The scientific conceptual framework for Land Degradation Neutrality (2018, background): “This is the most conservative way to integrate the separate indicator values, consistent with the precautionary principle, however it is prone to false positive error (Borja et al., 2014).”