We use a simple model of ecosystem management to demonstrate that apparently rational management approaches can lead to ecological collapse. Our model of the ecosystem management of lake eutrophication integrates lake dynamics, management decision-making, and learning in a framework that is deliberately simplified to highlight the role of model uncertainty. The simulated lake can switch between...

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a major literature review. These general principle...

The concept of ecosystem services--the benefits that nature provides to human's society--has gained increasing attention over the past decade. Increasing global abiotic and biotic change, including species invasions, is threatening the secure delivery of these ecosystem services. Efficient evaluation methods of ecosystem services are urgently needed to improve our ability to determine managemen...

BACKGROUND Ecosystem modeling applied to fisheries remains hampered by a lack of local information. Fishers' knowledge could fill this gap, improving participation in and the management of fisheries. METHODOLOGY The same fishing area was modeled using two approaches: based on fishers' knowledge and based on scientific information. For the former, the data was collected by interviews through t...

Preservation of ecosystems requires an understanding of the ecosystem processes that regulate ecosystem resources. Patches and inter-patch features are parts of the ecosystem that are partially responsible for effects on transporting and storing materials in the ecosystem. The structural features of ecological patches including size, number and the average inter-patch length are important becau...

Global change is increasingly challenging the sustainable provisioning of ecosystem services to society. Addressing future uncertainty and risk has therefore become a central problem of ecosystem management. With risk management and resilience-based stewardship, two contrasting approaches have been proposed to address this issue. Whereas one is concentrated on anticipating and mitigating risks,...

This paper defines the specifications of a management language intended to automate the control and administration of various service components connected to a digital ecosystem. It is called EML short for Ecosystem Management Language and it is based on proprietary syntax and notation and contains a set of managerial commands issued by the system’s administrator via a command console. Addition...

Several of the most important conservation prioritization approaches select markedly different areas at global and regional scales. They are designed to maximize a certain biodiversity dimension such as coverage of species in the case of hotspots and complementarity, or composite properties of ecosystems in the case of wilderness. Most comparisons between approaches have ignored the multidimens...

Ecosystem modelling is increasingly used to explore ecosystem-level effects of changing environmental conditions and management actions. For coral reefs there has been increasing interest in recent decades in the use of ecosystem models for evaluating the effects of fishing and the efficacy of marine protected areas. However, ecosystem models that integrate physical forcings, biogeochemical and...

Urban ecosystem health assessments can be applied extensively in urban management to evaluate the status quo of the urban ecosystem, identify the limiting factors, identify key problems, optimize the scheme and guide ecological regulation. Regarding the multi-layer roles of urban ecosystems, urban ecosystem health should be assessed at different scales with each assessment providing a specific ...