6 - Assessing ecosystem functioning

Summary

No general agreement exists about to how to conceptualise and assess ecosystem functioning. There are a couple of approaches which attempt to measure some sort of ecosystem functioning, though under different labels. In this chapter I will investigate the most prominent of these approaches, particularly the concepts of ecosystem integrity, ecosystem health, ecosystem resilience, and ecosystem stability. To analyse the different approaches I will use the insights and analytic tools developed in the previous chapters. Special emphasis will be given to the question of how and under what circumstances the concepts can be applied to assess ecosystem functioning in the practice of conservation and resource management. A broader, more generally applicable conceptual framework for describing, classifying, and assessing different ideas and measures of ecosystem functioning will then be presented in Chapter 7. First, however, let me briefly summarise the results of the previous chapters to show our departure point.

Ecosystem functioning: the baseline

I have shown that ecosystem functioning means different things to different people. The basic types of understanding of ecosystem functioning are: (1) ecosystem functioning simply denotes some processes (or even properties) at the level of an ecosystem; (2) ecosystem functioning pertains to the performance of the whole system. Meaning 1 may sometimes serve to indicate Meaning 2, i.e. constitute a kind of proxy for Meaning 2; but, although often implicit, this is not always the case.