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The field of ecosystem health explores the interactions between natural systems, human health, and social organization. As decision makers require a sound, modular approach to environmental management and sustainable development, ecosystem health assessment indicators are increasingly used across any number of applications. The Handbook of Ecologic
Through the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the governments of the United States & Canada have committed to restore & maintain the chemical, physical, & biological integrity of the waters of the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. To fulfill its mandate to evaluate Agreement progress and provide advice to governments, the International Joint Commission requires data & information. The Commission has identified, as one priority activity, the identification of indicators to evaluate Agreement progress. Consequently, it established an Indicators for Evaluation Task Force in 1993 which undertook to develop an appropriate framework & indicators which would facilitate the Commission's evaluation of Agreement progress. This report begins with background on the Agreement, the Task Force, the Commission's approach to evaluation, and the Task Force's investigations. Chapter 2 describes the concept of indicators. Chapter 3 presents indicator organizing principles and an ecosystem-based methodology. Chapter 4 describes a framework for evaluation of Agreement progress which relates the Agreement purpose (ecosystem integrity) to desired outcomes, indicators to characterize each desired outcome, associated data & information to support each indicator, and relevant stresses. Chapter 5 identifies nine selected desired outcomes for the Great Lakes basin ecosystem, along with representative indicators & associated measurements that can be used to evaluate Agreement progress. Chapter 6 presents conclusions & recommendations.
The International Joint Commission established the Indicators Implementation Task Force to assist in implementing integrative indicators of Great Lakes Basin ecosystem integrity. This report reviews activities of the Task Force, including its research of Great Lakes databases, technical reviews, and workshop proceedings. It explains the Task Force relationship with the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference (SOLEC), and compares the Task Force proposed suite of indicators with the SOLEC suite with regard to desired outcomes related to swimmability, fishability, drinkability, population health, economic viability, & others. The final section includes recommendations regarding data & information management, implementation & development of indicators, and long-term involvement by the Commission. The appendix reviews other initiatives using environmental indicators.
Demographics, pollution, water, air, mercury, disease, cancer, birth defects.
How are the Great Lakes doing and what progress are we making in protecting and restoring them? These are two of the most frequently asked questions about the largest source of surface fresh water in the world. Unfortunately, we do not have simple answers for them. With the tremendous efforts and resources invested in restoration by governments, the private sector, and non-profit organizations in the United States and Canada over the past 40 years, we need to be able to respond much more clearly and definitively in the future. Recognizing this, the International Joint Commission (IJC) through its Science Advisory Board and Water Quality Board initiated a project to put the Great Lakes community in a position to respond. The focus of the work is to identify a limited number of ecosystem indicators especially important to the health of the Great Lakes basin ecosystem and which tell us the most about it. Extensive work has been done over the years to measure the condition of the Lakes as part of the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference (SOLEC), and this work will form the basis for many of the indicators. What is being done now is selecting "the fewest that tell us the most." The need for key indicators is even greater now with a new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (the Agreement) between the United States and Canada. The two countries have determined that we should be able to drink the water, eat the fish, and swim at the beaches. To assess progress toward these goals and the overall condition of the Lakes, the indicators presented in this report are aligned with the chemical, physical and biological integrity framework included in the Agreement. The focus here is on ecological indicators. Indicators for public health will be covered in a separate, but related, report.