Ecosystem Health最新文献

ABSTRACT This paper argues for a syntropic, multilevel conceptualization of ecotoxicology beyond the simple organism-level effects of poisons. Such a concept embraces complex systems, ecotoxicology, ecoepidemiology, and ecosystem health and integrity. One way of thinking about the relative stability of ecosystems and their biological and nonbiological components is the conditional (Bayesian) probability of their coherent versus incoherent response to perturbation. Anthropogenic and natural stress may change the structure, function and/or organization of dissipative systems at any level, compromising self-regulation and making unstable incoherent responses more probable. Syntropic ecotoxicology argues for increased understanding of how ecotoxic agents or events may be disrupting self-regulating mechanisms at the molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and/or community levels—their multilevel ecotoxicodynamics. In parallel, and adaptive to new knowledge, interdisciplinary teams of scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders must collaborate effectively to mobilize and integrate financial, human, material, and information resources to prevent and control existing priority deterministic stressors.

ABSTRACT Palliative care is the active total care of patients whose disease is not responsive to curative treatment. This paper presents a proposition that the principles of palliative care may offer a useful conceptual map that helps promote understanding of the degradation of landscapes and the decline of rural communities from an ecosystem management perspective. Landscape reorganization by humans for food and other production requires considerable inputs of energy and effort. Current trends of landscape degradation indicate that human endeavors have resulted in the loss of functional landscapes with a concurrent decline in ecosystem services. The argument can be made that, in cases where ecosystem degradation is extensive, the landscape may be terminally ill and in need of palliative care. The fundamental principles and components of palliative care are described and questions are posed regarding the extent to which palliative care principles and components challenge and extend current land management philosophies and practices.

ABSTRACT We live at a time when billions of people on this earth cannot achieve their full potential. Their lives are cut short or impoverished by malnutrition, pollution, and disease caused by failure of ecosystem and social services. In addition, if we were to project the quality of life enjoyed by those in advanced industrial countries to the world's poor, we would need about two planets to satisfy the demands for resources and waste assimilation services. Superimposed on the degradation of social systems, ecosystems worldwide are experiencing major threats to their integrity and health. Excessive human impacts are degrading ecosystem service provision, breaking and contracting food chains and making them less productive. Despite a growing understanding of social and ecosystem dysfunctionality, there remains little movement toward social sustainability and the restoration of the health of ecosystems worldwide. This paper presents an ethical foundation for those who seek sustainability. The key to such an applied ethic is the idea of directionality, where the natural tendency toward increasing complexity and diversity in complex adaptive systems provides guidance on what constitutes a sustainable society. The achievement of such a society can be facilitated by an ethic of potentiality that will assist humans to reintegrate ecosystem and human health.

ABSTRACT Spatially explicit identification of changes in ecological conditions over large areas is key to targeting and prioritizing areas for environmental protection and restoration by managers at watershed, basin, and regional scales. A critical limitation to this point has been the development of methods to conduct such broad-scale assessments. Field-based methods have proven to be too costly and too inconsistent in their application to make estimates of ecological conditions over large areas. New spatial data derived from satellite imagery and other sources, the development of statistical models relating landscape composition and pattern to ecological endpoints, and geographic information systems (GIS) make it possible to evaluate ecological conditions at multiple scales over broad geographic regions. In this study, we demonstrate the application of spatially distributed models for bird habitat quality and nitrogen yield to streams to assess the consequences of landcover change across the mid-Atlantic region between the 1970s and 1990s. Moreover, we present a way to evaluate spatial concordance between models related to different environmental endpoints. Results of this study should help environmental managers in the mid-Atlantic region target those areas in need of conservation and protection.

ABSTRACT Natural resource managers have articulated “health” narrowly and vaguely as the condition of the biophysical environment. It is too tempting for natural resource managers to take data generated from rapid assessment techniques of biophysical condition (like species richness) as surrogates for “biodiversity.” This paper takes the view that these common applications of the terms “health” and “biodiversity” obscure a meaningful search for the relationships between biodiversity, human health, and the socioeconomic well-being of human communities. Using examples of landscapes and inland waters in Australia, we argue that the biodiversity of inland waters and human health are linked in at least two ways. Biodiversity, and its endemic features, contribute to a person's attachment to a particular place and become part of a person's identity. Loss, destruction, or change in a location has the potential to affect an individual's psychological well-being, and challenge a community's identity and image of itself. Any inland waterway also has the potential to harbor biota that can directly affect the health of humans. We are exposed to this biota when we develop locations inappropriately, when we (mis)treat inland waters, or as a by-product of other land and water developments. Our health may be compromised by attempts to control this biota. And our perceptions of a place may change dramatically according to the presence of these and other organisms, or according to our efforts at their control, as illustrated by cases involving wetlands, mosquitoes, and arboviruses. We conclude by arguing that the health of inland aquatic systems will be best articulated by intertwining biodiversity, endemism, perception of place, environmental (landscape) degradation, disease-causing organisms, and management of the aquatic resource. The health sector and natural resource management agencies are encouraged to recognize the synergies between these issues in their policies and practices.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is twofold: (A) to describe the challenges of reporting on changes in ecosystem health at landscape scales, and (B) to review the statistical and mathematical techniques that allow the derivation of landscape health assessments from a variety of data consisting of remote sensing imagery, demographic and socioeconomic censuses, natural resource surveys, long-term ecological research, and other geospatial information that is site specific.

We draw upon seven innovative and integrative concepts and tools that together will provide the next generation of ecosystem health assessments at regional scales. The first is the concept of ecosystem health, which integrates across the social, natural, physical, and health sciences to provide the basis for comprehensive assessments of regional environments. The second consists of innovative stochastic techniques for representing human disturbance and ecosystem response in landscapes, and the corresponding statistical tools for analyzing them. The third constitutes representation of spatial biocomplexity in landscapes through application of echelon analysis to assessment. The fourth concerns innovative combination techniques of upper-echelon-based spatial scan statistic to detect, delineate, and prioritize critical study areas for evaluating and prioritizing causal factors and effects. The fifth involves the capability of comparing and prioritizing a collection of entities in light of multiple criteria, using poset mathematics of partial order with rank frequency statistics, to provide multicriterion decision support. The sixth lies in extending data mining and visualization techniques to determine associations between geospatial patterns and ecosystem degradation at landscape scales. The seventh encompasses comprehensive studies conducted on different types of regional ecosystems.

Our focus is to show how the integration of recent advances in quantitative techniques and tools will facilitate the evaluation of ecosystem health and its measurement at a variety of landscape scales. The challenge is to characterize, evaluate, and validate linkages between socioeconomic drivers, biogeochemical indicators, multiscale landscape pattern metrics, and quality of human life indicators. Initial applications of these quantitative techniques and tools have been with respect to regions in the eastern United States, including the U.S. Atlantic Slope and mid-Atlantic region.