Defining Ecological Quality

Assessment of ecological quality is central to environmental management but at present little consensus exists on what it constitutes. Without consensus on a definition of ecological quality effective ecosystem management is complicated, its acceptance across different elements in society is unlikely, and development of legislation to enforce it is problematic. Developing such quality standards is clearly important, but is hard to do in a robust and consistent way. Increasing recognition of the validity of including human values as part of our understanding of ecological quality has arisen with the concept of ecosystem services, i.e. the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, as a means of valuing ecosystems. This shift in emphasis towards ecosystem services provides an approach to the valuation of ecosystems in terms of what they do, particularly in relation to the support of human life, but has not yet supplanted the notions of health or integrity as concepts of ecological quality. This is partly an issue of scaling; global scale assessments of ecosystem services do not lend themselves to site-specific evaluations of individual ecosystems, the scale at which much management or conservation takes place.

Aims

The aims of the present project are to reconsider the merits of the current concepts and to develop a novel framework for the assessment of ecological quality based on ecosystem services. Research challenges include the consideration of interdependencies among ecosystem services and spatial and temporal linkages in the provision of and demands for ecosystem services.