ABSTRACT
Aiding the meaningful assessment of environmental change is the implementation and development of insightful environmental indicators. Indicators such as species community features, their biological attributes, or other innovative metrics of abiotic features have promise in assessing trends in environmental conditions. However, scientists must be mindful in the development of these indicators to avoid the circularly reasoned, tautological “trap” of using a biological parameter to predict or classify an environmental condition and, subsequently, using the same environmental condition to classify the same biological parameter. With this caveat, effective environmental indicators have an advantage in assessing environmental change in that they are often directly related to the problem being evaluated and thus are ecologically meaningful.
