Translating Ecological Integrity terms into operational language to inform societies

Abstract

It is crucial that societies are informed on the risks of impoverished ecosystem health for their well-being. For this purpose, Ecological Integrity (EI) is a useful concept that seeks to capture the complex nature of ecosystems and their interaction with social welfare. But the challenge remains to measure EI and translate scientific terminology into operational language to inform society. We propose an approach that simplifies marine ecosystem complexity by applying scientific knowledge to identify which components reflect the state or state change of ecosystems. It follows a bottom-up structure that identifies, based on expert knowledge, biological components related with past and present changing conditions. It is structured in 5 stages that interact in an adaptive way: stage 1, in situ observations suggest changes could be happening; stage 2 explores available data that represent EI; stage 3, experts' workshops target the identification of the minimum set of variables needed to define EI, or the risk of losing EI; an optative stage 4, where deviance from EI, or risk of deviance, is statistically assessed; stage 5, findings are communicated to society. We demonstrate the framework effectiveness in three case studies, including a data poor situation, an area where lack of reference sites hampers the identification of historical changes, and an area where diffuse sources of stress make it difficult to identify simple relationships with of ecological responses. The future challenge is to operationalise the approach and trigger desirable society actions to strengthen a social-nature link.

From Science to Evidence – How Biodiversity Indicators Can Be Used for Effective Marine Conservation Policy and Management

“…Regardless of the scientific soundness of an indicator, or even the appropriateness for a specific policy, the lack of involvement of end-users (e.g., marine managers, policy-makers, and stakeholders) during the development of indicators may result in unsuccessful implementation of the outputs or even the application and use of the indicator itself. A solution resulting in fit-for-purpose biodiversity indicators is to co-produce indicators, with scientists providing the scientific input and decision-makers providing the policy steer (Lemos and Morehouse, 2005;Hayes et al, 2015;Bolman et al, 2018;Cvitanovic and Hobday, 2018;De Juan et al, 2018). Co-production spans the science-policy interface and is an iterative process, with each party relying on the other's experience and expertise to gain a deeper understanding of the current science and policy landscapes, opportunities, and limitations (Lemos and Morehouse, 2005).…”

Monitoring the Environmental, Social and Economic Dimensions of the Landing Obligation Policy

“…A neutral response was also assigned to ecological indicators, likely because experts are still uncertain on the potential effects of the LO on the ecosystem, and only assumptions are made when assessing the indirect effects caused by changing fishing practices, i.e., changes in the integrity of ecosystems (Bellido et al, 2011;Heath et al, 2014;Moutopoulos et al, 2018). These indicators are also intended to reflect an improved ecosystem status due to changing fishing practices, e.g., the diversity of functional traits or the sensitive habitat presence and extend (Thrush and Dayton, 2002;de Juan et al, 2009de Juan et al, , 2018. Participants assumed that only one indicator (i.e., Discard rate) would decrease, although there was a large variation in experts' opinions.…”

“…The essential properties of biological and socio-economic variables to become candidate indicators are their ability to inform on the direction of change in a fishery system (Jennings, 2005). Other useful properties of the variables are that they could be relatively easy or inexpensive to measure within current fisheries data collection schemes and that they should be easily understood by fisheries managers and other stakeholders, in order to facilitate good governance and decision making (Lembo et al, 2017;de Juan et al, 2018). In this work, a candidate list of variables was identified from relevant literature (amongst others: Jennings, 2005;Rice and Rochet, 2005;FAO, 2009;Lockerbie et al, 2016) and was then assessed by LO experts with the application of quality criteria (Queirós et al, 2016).…”

A Qualitative Exploratory Analysis of Ecological Integrity for Safeguarding World Natural Heritage Sites: Case Study of Shiretoko Peninsula, Japan

“…EI, as analyzed in this study, can be a pertinent conceptual tool in this regard. Finally, a number of studies have highlighted the potential of EI to inform sustainable management of natural areas and raise social awareness [62,63]; and the insights gained from this WNHS are useful for designing robust natural heritage conservation schemes that can deliver meaningful results against the general backdrop of pervasive anthropogenic fragmentation of the planet's biophysical heritage.…”