Ecological quality assessment: A framework to report ecosystems quality and their dynamics from reference conditions

作者：Anthony Sturbois, Miquel De Cáceres, Aline Bifolchi, Frédéric Bioret, Aurélien Boyé, Olivier Gauthier, Jacques Grall, Antoine Grémare, Céline Labrune, Alexandre Robert, Gauthier Schaal, Nicolas Desroy · 发表于：Ecosphere · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1002/ecs2.4726 · 被引用次数：32 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Species Distribution and Climate Change、Land Use and Ecosystem Services

Abstract Worldwide, ecosystems are suffering important taxonomic and functional modifications in response to anthropogenic disturbances, operating at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Awareness on biodiversity losses has led to the adoption of conservation policies and the development of programs devoted to the conservation and the restoration of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. The assessment of the ecological health of ecosystems requires measuring and characterizing restoration or degradation dynamics and their consequences on the ecological quality with respect to reference conditions defined pragmatically as conservation targets. Methodological innovations, in terms of data collection, analysis, and visualization, have an important influence on the ability of ecologists to understand biodiversity changes. The assessment of the quality of ecosystems with respect to reference conditions requires to address, notably, three main challenges: the definition of reference conditions, the assessment of the degree of achievement of conservation objectives, and the qualitative and quantitative characterization of recovering and departing patterns. We propose here the ecological quality assessment (EQA) framework as a data‐driven approach to track ecological quality focusing on the distance of the tested stations with respect to a chosen reference envelope using fuzzy logic and trajectory analysis. We take advantage of those analytical tools to propose a general a...