Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Integrity: Problems and Potential Solutions

Scrimgeour, Garry J.; Wicklum, Dan

doi:10.2307/1467951

Cited by 55 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Ecosystem health is difficult to define and there has been much debate surrounding the definition of the term and the merits of the overall concept (Rapport et al, 1998;Karr, 1999;Vugteveen et al, 2006). While some argue that the ecosystem health is undefinable (Scrimgeour & Wicklum, 1996), less scientific than related concepts such as ecosystem integrity, and not a measurable ecological property (Suter, 1993), the concept has merit in being readily interpretable by managers, politicians, stakeholders and the general public such that it is now common place in public policy and dialogue (Vugteveen et al, 2006). Given this broad adoption and identification in policy, the concept must be embraced, and the science necessary to underpin the concept performed.…”

Section: Defining Groundwater Ecosystem Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tiered framework for assessing groundwater ecosystem health

Korbel

Hose

2010

Hydrobiologia

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The notion of ecosystem health has been widely adopted in environmental policy, particularly in the management of river systems. Despite this, even a notional understanding of ecosystem health and its assessment in connected aquifer ecosystems remains elusive. In this article, we propose a definition and provide a tiered framework for the assessment of ecosystem health in groundwater. From the literature we identify general attributes of a healthy groundwater ecosystem and from these develop primary (Tier 1) indicators of health. Where Tier 1 benchmarks are exceeded or more detailed assessment is required, we discuss a range of indicators (Tier 2) that may together generate a multimetric index of groundwater health. Our case study using samples from an alluvial aquifer in north-western New South Wales, Australia, demonstrates the utility of both tiers of the framework, and the ability of the approach to separate disturbed and undisturbed sites. The process of multimetric development is simple and our Tier 2 benchmarks determined from limited data. Nevertheless, our framework will be applicable and readily adaptable to site-specific contexts.

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Section: Defining Groundwater Ecosystem Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tiered framework for assessing groundwater ecosystem health

Korbel

Hose

2010

Hydrobiologia

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“…Value-based concepts stemming from normative science can be compelling, but even many proponents concede that there are serious conceptual or operational difficulties with such concepts. Whether the intuitive heuristic value of the phrase ecosystem health "outweighs its clearly invalid theoretical implications remains to be seen" (Scrimgeour and Wicklum 1996). But what, if any, are the alternatives?…”

Section: Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is considered by many to be a useful, perhaps essential, concept in formulating ecological policies. It has an extensive following, especially in the popular media and with advocacy groups (Scrimgeour and Wicklum 1996, Gaudet et al 1997, Lancaster 2000.…”

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confidence: 99%

Values, Policy, and Ecosystem Health

Lackey¹

2001

BioScience

181

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“…is at the same time very clear in the field and absolutely vague when it has to be translated into a set of rules, or into a concise definition, exactly like the concept of beauty. And, like beauty, ecological status is not an emergent property of ecosystems, nor a property that can be univocally defined (Scrimgeour and Wicklum, 1996): on the contrary, it is based on the personal interpretation of a natural phenomenology. Nevertheless, ecologists who share a common theoretical background (a common ecological aesthetics?)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An expert system based on fish assemblages for evaluating the ecological quality of streams and rivers

Scardi

Cataudella

Dato

et al. 2008

Ecological Informatics

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Fish species have been often used as indicators of environmental quality in aquatic ecosystems, while biotic indices based on fish have become common tools in ecological monitoring. Nevertheless, such indices are far from perfect, mainly because they are based on assumptions that sometimes are not met and because they cannot be optimized from a computational point of view. As any other method, they rely upon expert judgments for selecting relevant metrics, combining metrics into a score and defining thresholds between ecological status classes in the scoring scale. Provided that no procedure can be entirely objective in evaluating ecological status, as this very concept is inherently subjective, we propose a novel approach in which the unavoidable subjective elements only play a role in the earliest steps, while the subsequent optimization of the evaluation procedure is as objective as possible. An expert system, designed after this concept for Latium (Central Italy) river basins and based on a multilayer perceptron neural network, was developed and implemented into a Graphical User Interface (GUI) in order to make it easily accessible to non-technical users. The neural network reconstructs experts' judgments on the basis of a set of abiotic descriptors and fish assemblage composition, thus providing consensus estimates of ecological status for any river stretch. This approach allows easily the incorporation into the expert system of new data and new expert judgments as soon as they become available. However, the very first version of the expert system is already able to correctly classify 2 out of 3 cases, while the worst classification error does not exceed a single class of ecological status. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

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Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Integrity: Problems and Potential Solutions

Cited by 55 publications

References 25 publications

A tiered framework for assessing groundwater ecosystem health

A tiered framework for assessing groundwater ecosystem health

Values, Policy, and Ecosystem Health

An expert system based on fish assemblages for evaluating the ecological quality of streams and rivers

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