Conservation prioritization usually focuses on conservation of rare species or biodiversity, rather than ecological processes. This is partially due to a lack of informative indicators of ecosystem function. Biological soil crusts (BSCs) trap and retain soil and water resources in arid ecosystems and function as major carbon and nitrogen fixers; thus, they may be informative indicators of ecosy...

Ecosystem health is an important index of the regional sustainable development. In view of the singularity of indicator selection caused by the limited application of remote sensing and GIS at present, this paper took the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model as reference, and revised the model in multi-analysis foundation. The pressure, vigor, organization structure, response and resilience were...

The e-business ecosystem may be deviate from the equilibrium state in its development process. In this article the authors defined the e-business ecosystem health by combining ecological principles, and developed ecological indicators of e-business ecosystem health. The method of ecosystem health assessment (include biodiversity index method and index of biological integrity method) was introdu...

To inform the design and implementation of land-use policies that consider the variety of goods and services people derive from ecosystems, it is essential to understand spatial patterns of individual services, how multiple services relate to each other, and how these relationships vary across spatial scales and localities. Despite the importance of freshwater as a determinant of regional econo...

Discussions of the coastal environment and its health can be improved by more precise use of terms and clarification of the relationship, if any, between the health of ecosystems and the risks to human health. Ecosystem health is seldom defined and, in any case, has to be regarded in different terms than human health. Ecosystem health should embody both the structure and function of the ecosyst...

Introduction This Information Paper contributes to Project 46 " Development/review of models, such as full development of an ECOSIM model, for evaluation of fishery and environmental impacts on ecosystem, including development of reference points " and provides complimentary analyses for Project 43 " Ecological Risk Analysis, including PSA " and Project 62 " SEAPODYM simulation modeling ". The ...

A lake ecosystem is continuously exposed to environmental stressors with non-linear interrelationships between abiotic factors and aquatic organisms. Ecosystem health depicts the capacity of system to respond to external perturbations and still maintain structure and function. In this study, we explored the effects of abiotic factors on ecosystem health of Taihu Lake in 2013, China from a syste...

Three trophic mass-balance models representing coral reef ecosystems along a fishery gradient were compared to evaluate ecosystem effects of fishing. The majority of the biomass estimates came directly from a large-scale visual survey program; therefore, data were collected in the same way for all three models, enhancing comparability. Model outputs-such as net system production, size structure...

Regime shifts are large, long-lasting changes in ecosystems. They are often hard to predict but may have leading indicators which are detectable in advance. Potential leading indicators include wider swings in dynamics of key ecosystem variables, slower return rates after perturbation and shift of variance towards lower frequencies. We evaluated these indicators using a food web model calibrate...