Functionalizing ecological integrity
Ecological integrity is important in this biodiversity hotspot for animals and plants, located in the Chiricahua Mountains of the Coronado National Forest, Douglas Ranger District.
“Ecological integrity” might sound like alphabet soup, but it’s an important concept for the thousands of land managers around the United States who are working to keep National Forests and Grasslands healthy. “Ecological integrity” is defined as the quality of an ecosystem when its dominant ecological characteristics (for example, connectivity or species composition) occur within the natural range of variation and can withstand and recover from most natural or human-caused disturbances. The National Forest System is required to monitor ecological integrity, which also can help to ensure that they are maintaining productive forests, reducing wildfire risk, and providing recreational opportunities to the public. But what is the best way to go about monitoring such a complex concept?
Scientists from the Rocky Mountain research station have provided a roadmap for a new, efficient way of monitoring ecological integrity that draws on new technology, data availability, and computation power to incorporate wildlife into this monitoring effort. To date, ecological integrity monitoring has taken on many different forms depending on the situation, but in terrestrial systems, wildlife has typically been excluded due to monitoring challenges. The scientists argue that this is a missed opportunity since monitoring wildlife can provide important information about ecosystem health – like food webs and habitat quality – that is unavailable from other sources.
The scientists show that monitoring ecological integrity can be improved by incorporating animals’ “functional traits” – or feeding-, habitat-, behavior-, and morphology-related traits – since these traits make it possible to compare ecological integrity across ecosystems. Then, this information can be included in future adaptive management efforts on National Forests and Grasslands to ensure that information about ecological integrity monitoring is efficient and cost-effective.