Framework for understanding marine ecosystem health
By P. Tett, R. Gowen, S. Painting, Michael Elliott, R. Forster, D. Mills, E. Bresnan, E. Capuzzo, T. Fernandes, J. Foden and 11 more. 2013
218 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT: Although the terms 'health' and 'healthy' are often applied to marine ecosystems and communicate information about holistic condition (e.g. as required by the Ecosystem Approach), their meaning is unclear. Ecosystems have been understood in various ways, from non-interacting populations of species to complex integrated systems. Health has been seen as a metaphor, an indicator that aggregates over system components, or a non-localized emergent system property. After a review, we define good ecosystem health as: 'the condition of a system that is self-maintaining, vigorous, resilient to externally imposed pressures, and able to sustain services to humans. It contains healthy organisms and populations, and adequate functional diversity and functional response diversity. All expected trophic levels are present and well interconnected, and there is good spatial connectivity amongst subsystems.' We equate this condition with good ecological or environmental status, e.g. as referred to by recent EU Directives. Resilience is central to health, but difficult to measure directly. Ecosystems under anthropogenic pressure are at risk of losing resilience, and thus of suffering regime shifts and loss of services. For monitoring whole ecosystems, we propose an approach based on 'trajectories in ecosystem state space', illustrated with time-series from the northwestern North Sea. Change is visualized as Euclidian distance from an arbitrary reference state. Variability about a trend in distance is used as a proxy for inverse resilience. We identify the need for institutional support for long time-series to underpin this approach, and for research to establish state space co-ordinates for systems in good health. Changes in the northern North Sea, 1958-2008, plotted in a state space defined by the breeding success of kittiwakes, abundance of copepods Calanus spp., and simulated annual primary production.© Inter-Research 2013. www.int-res.com.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c340984c08c883d380436cd24cedccaf467817ce
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Citations in the corpus
- Tales from a thousand and one ways to integrate marine ecosystem components when assessing the environmental status (2014, background): “Different attempts to understand, define and assess ecosystem health have been made in recent years (Costanza and Mageau, 1999; Ulanowicz, 2000; Mee et al., 2008; Ojaveer and Eero, 2011; Borja et al., 2013; Tett et al., 2013).”
- Mapping ecosystem services provided by benthic habitats in the European North Atlantic Ocean (2014, background): “(ii) Mapping services based on spatial distribution and patterns of different ecosystem components, processes and their relationships, including the need for future scenarios.”
- Marine biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships: The potential for practical monitoring applications (2015, unknown): “Furthermore, these ecosystem functions represent a signi fi cant component of ecosystem health (Tett et al., 2013) and provide ecosystem services that bene fi t society (Paterson et al., 2012).”
- How to value biodiversity in environmental management (2015, background): “Another requirement is to use an extended series for etecting inter-annual variability, which reveals the resilience of he system (Tett et al., 2013).”
- A Catalogue of Marine Biodiversity Indicators (2016, methodology): “The NEAT follows an Ecosystem Approach (Tett et al., 2013), ensuring that all ecosystem features relevant to the assessment are accounted for (Borja et al., 2016a).”