TY - CHAP

T1 - Ecosystem Health Indicators

AU - Burkhard, B.

AU - Müller, F.

AU - Lill, A.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Copyright: Copyright 2019 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2008/1/1

Y1 - 2008/1/1

N2 - Ecosystem health is a concept that integrates environmental conditions with the impacts of anthropogenic activities in order to give information for a sustainable use and management of natural resources. Therefore, related indicators have to reflect these anthropogenic impacts to represent the complex cause and effect relations in human-environmental systems. In comparison to the human health concept, different kinds of indicators for the assessment of various conditions and trends are available. In general, health means the absence of diseases, a good state, and the well-functioning of a system. As a physician uses general indices as temperature, blood pressure, or redness to assess human health, such general attributes like land cover, species abundance, or water body conditions can be found in ecosystems also. For more detailed investigations, specific indicators are available related to certain topics or different parts of the system. For holistic assessments, indicator sets that combine different features have to be used, as a physician combines different parameters for his final diagnosis. With regard to the special characteristics of ecosystems, their spatial heterogeneity, multilevel phenomena, and multiple variables of interest at multiple timescales have to be taken into account. Different concepts of indicator derivation and exemplary sets of indicators are presented within the text. The focal categories are: indicators based on the abundance of selected species, indicators based on the concentration of selected elements, indicators based on ratios between different classes of organisms or elements, indicators based on ecological strategies or processes, indicators based on ecosystem composition and structure and systems theoretical holistic indicators. However, the application of indicators on appropriate temporal and spatial scales can be restricted by limited data availability. Therefore, surrogates or suboptimal parameters for the quantification of indicators have to be used often. With regard to environmental management, decision makers' actions are required if the ecosystem health indicators reach undesirable levels in order to restore preferred conditions and the functions of the respective ecosystem.

AB - Ecosystem health is a concept that integrates environmental conditions with the impacts of anthropogenic activities in order to give information for a sustainable use and management of natural resources. Therefore, related indicators have to reflect these anthropogenic impacts to represent the complex cause and effect relations in human-environmental systems. In comparison to the human health concept, different kinds of indicators for the assessment of various conditions and trends are available. In general, health means the absence of diseases, a good state, and the well-functioning of a system. As a physician uses general indices as temperature, blood pressure, or redness to assess human health, such general attributes like land cover, species abundance, or water body conditions can be found in ecosystems also. For more detailed investigations, specific indicators are available related to certain topics or different parts of the system. For holistic assessments, indicator sets that combine different features have to be used, as a physician combines different parameters for his final diagnosis. With regard to the special characteristics of ecosystems, their spatial heterogeneity, multilevel phenomena, and multiple variables of interest at multiple timescales have to be taken into account. Different concepts of indicator derivation and exemplary sets of indicators are presented within the text. The focal categories are: indicators based on the abundance of selected species, indicators based on the concentration of selected elements, indicators based on ratios between different classes of organisms or elements, indicators based on ecological strategies or processes, indicators based on ecosystem composition and structure and systems theoretical holistic indicators. However, the application of indicators on appropriate temporal and spatial scales can be restricted by limited data availability. Therefore, surrogates or suboptimal parameters for the quantification of indicators have to be used often. With regard to environmental management, decision makers' actions are required if the ecosystem health indicators reach undesirable levels in order to restore preferred conditions and the functions of the respective ecosystem.

KW - Assessment

KW - Diversity

KW - Ecosystem

KW - Ecosystem health

KW - Ecosystem state

KW - Human health

KW - Human-environmental systems

KW - Indicator

KW - Sustainability

KW - Systems theory

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85065407787&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/B978-008045405-4.00312-8

DO - 10.1016/B978-008045405-4.00312-8

M3 - Contribution to book/anthology

AN - SCOPUS:85065407787

SN - 9780080454054

SP - 1132

EP - 1138

BT - Encyclopedia of Ecology, Five-Volume Set

PB - Elsevier Inc.

ER -