What has the study of ecosystems contributed, where is the field going (and why), and what factors challenge its progress? These questions were the focus of the Cary Conference, which was held at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, in 1997. One product of that conference is this book, which attempts to provide some of the answers to these questions. The book's editors , M...

The main reason for promoting the concept of ecosystem services lies in its potential to contribute to environmental conservation. Highlighting the benefits derived from ecosystems fosters an understanding of humans' dependence on nature, as users of ecosystem services. However, the act of using ecosystem services may not be environmentally neutral. As with the use of products and services gene...

Some state governments in the US are beginning to adopt ecosystem management policies and practices for conserving natural resources. For the most part, the policies are consistent with the concept of sustaining both economies and the environment. In the western US, state-level ecosystem management programs are meant to increase the influence that states have on the Federal Ecosystem Management...

The current accessibility ecosystem that develops and delivers both assistive technologies and access features in mainstream technologies is not able to keep up, provide the diversity of solutions needed, nor reach more that a small portion of those who need them. To address this a large scale effort was proposed to provide an infrastructure that would allow the ecosystem to evolve into a quite...

A simple model termed ECOPATH is presented which estimates mean annual biomass, production, and consumption for components of an ecosystem. To use the model, the ecosystem must be partitioned into groups of similar species and provide for these species groups, estimates of production to biomass, diet, and food consumption. The ECOPATH model is applied to an ecosystem at French Frigate Shoals in...

The temporal variability of ecosystem respiration (RECO) has been reported to have important effects on the temporal variability of net ecosystem exchange, the net amount of carbon exchanged between an ecosystem and the atmosphere. However, our understanding of ecosystem respiration is rather limited compared with photosynthesis or gross primary productivity, particularly in Mediterranean monta...

Isotopic net ecosystem exchange (isofluxes, or flux densities of CO2) can be combined with standard eddy covariance methods to partition net ecosystem exchange of carbon dioxide (F) into its component one-way fluxes, photosynthesis and respiration. At present, the approaches used to estimate isotopic fluxes are labor-intensive and dependent on several assumptions. To assess the relative utility...

E have historically been interested in the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Widespread loss of diversity caused by anthropogenic forces has heightened this interest and fostered a desire to determine the mechanisms underlying these relationships. Species diversity is expected to affect ecosystem processes, because the number and kinds of species present determine the...