A comprehensive system for State of Environment Reporting (SOER) must take into account indicators of stress on ecosystems, indicators of the state of the system (i.e., ecosystem structure and function), and indicators of social response (policy interventions).
Across the three ecosystems, indicators of relational capital provide important insights into the complexity of the business strand of the Triple Helix.
Our approach addresses the following heterogeneities: indicators specific to a given major ecosystem versus indicators representative of several major ecosystems; indicators belonging to different taxonomic, trophic, or functional groups; well-documented indicators identified by the ERN as strongly representative of any aspect of biodiversity; and spatial units of different size.
Given the important predatory role that hake plays in the CC, the amount and distribution of adult hake habitat has large implications for the Pacific Northwest food web and could thus serve as an ecosystem indicator representing important physical biological interactions.
Nonetheless, we decided to treat jellyfish biomass as an ecosystem indicator in order to illustrate how such variability would influence an indicator's usefulness in detecting utility thresholds.
We chose to evaluate the potential for sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) to serve as an ecosystem indicator because this species is a valuable component of commercial and recreational fisheries, of conservation interest, amenable to conventional monitoring techniques, and already subject to regular stock assessments [46].
In this case study, we chose to evaluate the potential for pelagic cnidarians and ctenophores (the carnivorous jellyfish group; hereafter, jellyfish) to serve as an ecosystem indicator because accumulating evidence suggests that human-induced pressures may be enabling their proliferation worldwide [53], [54].
Current research also includes the development of population, community, and ecosystem indicators for use in water quality assessment.
Consensus was developed through facilitated meetings that aimed to conceptualize the ecosystem, develop ecosystem indicators, and conduct risk analysis.
Spatially based ecosystem indicators such as the one we develop here address two important yet neglected areas in the 'Ecosystem Indicators debate': the importance of developing metrics explicitly representing spatial and environmental processes shaping ecosystem structure.
