Exergy as a Tool for Ecosystem Health Assessment

Exergy is demonstrated to be a useful measurable parameter reflecting the state of the ecosystem, and allowing estimation of the severity of its anthropogenous damage. Exergy is shown to have advantages such as good theoretical basis in thermodynamics, close relation to information theory, rather high correlation with others ecosystem goal functions and relative ease of computation. Nowadays exergy is often used in ecological assessment. This paper reviews the application of exergy in ecology in the fields of ecological modeling and natural ecosystem monitoring. Special attention is paid to the use of exergy for aquatic ecosystem studies, particularly, assessment of the lake Baikal ecosystem state.