Integrated Ecosystem Assessments: Developing the Scientific Basis for Ecosystem-Based Management of the Ocean

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Abstract

Integrated ecosystem assessments challenge the broader scientific community to move beyond the important task of tallying insults to marine ecosystems to developing quantitative tools that can support the decisions national and regional resource managers must make.

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Most cited references 35

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Evaluating and ranking the vulnerability of global marine ecosystems to anthropogenic threats.

Benjamin S Halpern, Kimberly A Selkoe, Fiorenza Micheli … (2007)

Marine ecosystems are threatened by a suite of anthropogenic stressors. Mitigating multiple threats is a daunting task, particularly when funding constraints limit the number of threats that can be addressed. Threats are typically assessed and prioritized via expert opinion workshops that often leave no record of the rationale for decisions, making it difficult to update recommendations with new information. We devised a transparent, repeatable, and modifiable method for collecting expert opinion that describes and documents how threats affect marine ecosystems. Experts were asked to assess the functional impact, scale, and frequency of a threat to an ecosystem; the resistance and recovery time of an ecosystem to a threat; and the certainty of these estimates. To quantify impacts of 38 distinct anthropogenic threats on 23 marine ecosystems, we surveyed 135 experts from 19 different countries. Survey results showed that all ecosystems are threatened by at least nine threats and that nine ecosystems are threatened by >90% of existing threats. The greatest threats (highest impact scores) were increasing sea temperature, demersal destructive fishing, and point-source organic pollution. Rocky reef, coral reef, hard-shelf, mangrove, and offshore epipelagic ecosystems were identified as the most threatened. These general results, however, may be partly influenced by the specific expertise and geography of respondents, and should be interpreted with caution. This approach to threat analysis can identify the greatest threats (globally or locally), most widespread threats, most (or least) sensitive ecosystems, most (or least) threatened ecosystems, and other metrics of conservation value. Additionally, it can be easily modified, updated as new data become available, and scaled to local or regional settings, which would facilitate informed and transparent conservation priority setting.

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Resilience, Robustness, and Marine Ecosystem-based Management

Simon Levin, Jane Lubchenco (2008)

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SLIDING BASELINES, GHOSTS, AND REDUCED EXPECTATIONS IN KELP FOREST COMMUNITIES

Paul Dayton, Mia J. Tegner, Peter Edwards … (1998)

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS Biol

Journal ID (publisher-id): pbio

Journal ID (publisher-id): plbi

Journal ID (pmc): plosbiol

Title: PLoS Biology

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )

ISSN (Print): 1544-9173

ISSN (Electronic): 1545-7885

Publication date (Print): January 2009

Publication date (Electronic): 20 January 2009

Volume: 7

Issue: 1

Electronic Location Identifier: e14

Author notes

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: Phil.Levin@ 123456noaa.gov

Article

Publisher ID: 08-PLBI-PS-2333R3

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000014

PMC ID: 2628402

PubMed ID: 19166267

SO-VID: 46c1ba83-6c5f-4b70-b136-63dcb8e14dcc

Copyright © This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain declaration, which stipulates that, once placed in the public domain, this work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose.

History

Page count

Pages: 6

Custom metadata

citation Levin PS, Fogarty MJ, Murawski SA, Fluharty D (2009) Integrated ecosystem assessments: Developing the scientific basis for ecosystem-based management of the ocean. PLoS Biol 7(1): e1000014. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000014

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Life sciences

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