The credibility and consequent sustainability of the biomedical research "ecosystem" is in jeopardy, in part due to an inability to reproduce data from the peer-reviewed literature.
Second, to represent information in the Directory through languages and terminologies that are 'compatible' with the biomedical information ecosystem.
One definition offered by Charron [ 9], sees EcoHealth as the recognition that "health and well-being are the result of complex and dynamic interactions between determinants, and between people, social and economic conditions, and ecosystems" and that EcoHealth "goes beyond prevailing biomedical or epidemiological approaches to health research".
Those problems, one participant noted, exist because "the current ecosystem was designed at a time when the biomedical sciences were consistently expanding, and it now must adjust to a condition closer to steady state".
The production of large amounts of synthetic industrial and biomedical chemicals as well as pollutants poses a risk to our ecosystem and induces negative effects on the health of wildlife and human beings.
Our ultimate goal is an understanding of the whole Earth system, so we must retain a broad range of biodiversity monitoring sites, but at the same time we should also focus research effort on key model ecosystems where we can achieve the intensity of outcomes the biomedical research community has with the model organism approach.
In a time when the fragility of the global ecosystem is a hot topic, the macrosystem of global environmental problems parallels the microcosm of the biomedical sphere known as the human body.
The fundamental challenge for implementation of this approach will be the integration of computational biology, evolutionary, and ecosystem-based approaches, found at the intersection of more traditional mathematics and biology departments, into biomedical and public health research, as others have noted (Koopman and Lynch 1999; Levins and Lopez 1999; McMichael 1999).
Fish are an important component of aquatic ecosystems and human life, being the prolific source of animal proteins worldwide and a vertebrate model for biomedical research.
