Environment Department, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
J Environ Manage. 2010 Jul;91(7):1446-55. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2010.02.004. Epub 2010 Mar 17.
The Ecosystem Approach to environmental management, with its explicit acknowledgment of the environmental, social and economic elements within ecological systems, is becoming increasingly adopted by managers and policy makers. However, there are few specific prescriptions as to exactly how these different elements should be integrated, or examples where historical changes have been tracked. Here, we assess the potential benefits and challenges of applying an Ecosystem Approach to management using one particular method, the Holistic Ecosystem Health Indicator (HEHI), which integrates data from the ecological, social and interactive dimensions into a single composite index of ecosystem 'health'. We apply it to one of the best-documented catchments in the UK, the Ythan Estuary in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, based on a 50-year time series of data. The evaluation of ecosystem health over time is lacking in previous applications of HEHI, yet is crucial for the assessment of the utility of this approach to ecosystem management. The application of HEHI yielded different insights to those revealed from the traditional application of biophysical approaches for managing the Ythan. Overall, ecological health declined through the 50-year period, although it increased marginally in the last decade, while social and interactive dimensions followed the opposite trend. HEHI indicated a steady increase in ecosystem health overall except for the last decade, when it declined marginally. Our evaluation of the application of ecosystem health for the Ythan revealed major data gaps. For the approach to be used more widely, issues of data availability and the temporal and geographical mismatch between ecological and social research boundaries need to be overcome.
生态系统方法在环境管理中得到了越来越多的应用，它明确承认生态系统中的环境、社会和经济要素。然而，对于如何具体整合这些不同的要素，或者对于跟踪历史变化的例子，几乎没有具体的规定。在这里，我们评估了使用一种特殊方法，即整体生态系统健康指标（HEHI），将生态、社会和交互维度的数据整合到一个单一的生态系统“健康”综合指数中，将生态系统方法应用于管理的潜在益处和挑战。我们将其应用于苏格兰阿伯丁郡 Ythan 河口，这是英国记录最完善的流域之一，基于 50 年的时间序列数据。与以前的 HEHI 应用相比，对生态系统健康随时间的评估是缺失的，但对于评估这种方法对生态系统管理的效用至关重要。HEHI 的应用得出的结论与传统应用生物物理方法管理 Ythan 得出的结论不同。总的来说，在 50 年的时间里，生态健康状况有所下降，尽管在过去十年中略有增加，而社会和互动维度则呈现相反的趋势。除了过去十年略有下降外，HEHI 总体上表明生态系统健康状况稳步上升。我们对 Ythan 生态系统健康应用的评估显示出重大的数据差距。为了更广泛地应用这种方法，需要解决数据可用性问题，以及生态和社会研究边界之间的时间和地理不匹配问题。
