Translating ecological integrity terms into operational language to inform societies

Highlights

• Ecological Integrity reflects the threat of ecosystem change to social welfare.
• We propose a bottom-up process with observation, expert judgement and outreach.
• The process starts when in situ observation suggests “something is wrong”.
• The outcome is a multi-metric index related with EI, or the risk of losing EI.
• Three case studies illustrate the approach in real-world scenarios.

Keywords

DPSIR, Ecosystem health, Ecological indicators, Socio-ecological systems, Environmental assessment