ABSTRACT
The idea of applying an assessment of ecosystem health in environmental management emerged in the late 1980s. The parallel to the assessment of human health is very obvious. We go to our doctor to get a diagnosis (What is wrong? Why do I not feel completely healthy?) and hopefully initiate a cure to bring us back to normal (= healthy conditions). Your doctor will apply several indicators/examinations (pulse, blood pressure, sugar in the blood, and urine, etc.) before he will come up with a diagnosis and a proper cure. The idea behind the assessment of ecosystem health is similar; see Figure 9.1. We observed that an ecosystem is not healthy and want a diagnosis: what is wrong? What caused this unhealthy condition? And what can we do to bring the ecosystem back to normal? To answer these questions, and also to follow the results of the “cure,” ecological indicators are applied, to provide synoptic information about the state of ecosystems, and their main attribute is the combination of several environmental factors in single values, which may be useful in terms of management and in the development of ecological concepts compliant to the general public’s understanding (Marques et al., 2009).
