Showing papers in "Ecological Indicators in 2006"

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use ground dwelling invertebrates such as carabid beetles and spiders as indicators of ecosystem disturbance in forested landscapes at both the short and long time scales, responding to both clearcut logging and fire differently.

TL;DR: Results of the study suggest that, over the period of 7 year, organic management method strongly affects soil quality indicators, particularly in terms of microbiological properties, which are sensitive soil indicators of changes occurred under the different farming systems.

TL;DR: Two aspects of the development of BTA for application to marine systems were investigated, including the comparative applicability of three analytical tools proposed for conducting BTA and the sensitivity of the approach to the number and type of traits selected for analysis.

TL;DR: In this paper, the appropriateness of species richness as an ecological indicator or decision variable for setting conservation and management priorities depends on many assumptions, such as the assumption that estimates of the species richness can be compared among locations.

TL;DR: In this paper, an approach is presented to merge both types of output by defining an indicator of social utility (SUMLU): production schemes are considered with respect to social utility of both commodity and non-commodity outputs.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined patterns of ecosystem diversity, deforestation and fragmentation and provided an estimate on their possible causes through a temporal and spatial analysis of biotic and abiotic data using remote sensing and geographical information systems.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the ability of the FQAI to indicate the level of anthropogenic disturbance in headwater wetlands in the Ridge and Valley physiographic province of central Pennsylvania.

TL;DR: The authors developed a plant-based index of biological integrity (IBI) to evaluate headwater wetland condition in response to anthropogenic disturbances in the Ridge and Valley Physiographic Province of central Pennsylvania.

TL;DR: The data show that there is probably not a single taxonomic or forest structural characteristic to be used as a general biodiversity indicator or surrogate for all the species, and the results support the view that different indicators shall be used for different forest types and taxonomic groups.

TL;DR: Objective criteria for selecting suitable focal species to identify important semi-natural elements in agricultural landscapes and provide quality indications at two different spatial scales are suggested.

TL;DR: The results suggest that relative risk of sub-regions from tourism pressure may not be adequately represented by official counted visits, and a new approach is developed to improve the estimates of pressure and fragility, and to provide relevant operational indicators.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated multiple biotic indicators from the Northeast U.S. large marine ecosystem (LME) to determine their potential utility in assessing ecosystem status, with a particular emphasis on the fish community and fishing pressure.

TL;DR: The algorithm generates a Q -90 value from a time series of model output; this allows biodiversity to be monitored over the course of a simulation and meets policy requirements for describing impacts on biodiversity.

TL;DR: The Florida Wetland Condition Index (FWCI) as mentioned in this paper was developed as a tool to evaluate the biological integrity of Florida depressional freshwater forested wetlands using community composition and chemical and physical water and soil parameters.

TL;DR: In this paper, the heavy metal status of water, sediment and plants in the Sultan Marsh was investigated, and it was found that the tissues of Potamogeton pectinatus accumulated heavy metals more than those of G. densa.

TL;DR: It is evident that indicators for landscape diversity are only able to illustrate changes of individual elements but not of the character of landscapes themselves, so it is necessary to additionally integrate aspects aside from quantitative ones when evaluating the visual landscape.

TL;DR: It was identified that forest management causes reduction and homogenization of CWD on study plots, which can trigger degradation processes and show significant differences in CWD between the virgin and virgin forest developmental phases.

TL;DR: It is shown to be sufficient to record only 50 of the most common species in order to obtain a community structure similar to that obtained from all the species, demonstrating the ability of multivariate methods to predict community structure in a particular region, based only on habitat parameters.

TL;DR: A comprehensive system for State of Environment Reporting (SOER) must take into account indicators of stress on ecosystems, indicators of the state of the system (i.e., ecosystem structure and function), and indicators of social response (policy interventions).

TL;DR: It is shown that the primary task of bioindicators is the general determination of physiological effects in the sense of strain reactions rather than the direct measurement of environmental concentrations of stressors, which has the advantage of a broad-based caveat, inducive to subsequent systematic search for quantitative causal inter-relationships.

TL;DR: This study demonstrates that biliary PAH metabolites are an effective indicator of exposure of fish to PAHs, and because factors other than contamination could also affect the liver size of wild fish, HSI alone may be not a reliable biomarker for assessing contaminant stress.

TL;DR: In this article, a thermodynamic and network analysis on the micro and meio-benthic community in a wide coastal area of the southern Adriatic Sea was performed to assess ecosystem health and to identify useful descriptors of environmental quality.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors studied seven small streams that drained catchments spanning disturbances that ranged from light infantry movements to heavy disturbances from tracked vehicle movements, and quantified disturbance level as the % of catchment occurring as bare ground on slopes > 3% and as unpaved road cover.

TL;DR: In this article, the data quality, empirical aspects of the moss-monitoring campaigns, like the monitoring net design, moss-sampling as well as chemical analysis are described.

TL;DR: Different samplings of some mullets species for the presence of skeletal malformations under the hypothesis that stressed environment should induce alteration in skeletal development pattern in fish resulted to be differently affected by skeletal anomalies according to the sampling site, showing significant differences among the type and rate of skeletal anomalies observed.

TL;DR: By supplementing eco-exergy with specific eco- exergy and buffer capacity, the paper obtains also direct indication of the level of information, respectively, the resistance of the ecosystem to perturbations.

TL;DR: Sukopp et al. as discussed by the authors used Raunkiaer's forms spectrum or the percentage of different geographical distribution types-chorotypes to measure the variability of the sites studied.

TL;DR: In both winter and summer seasons, PCA clearly separates the upper estuary stations from the lower estuary ones, on the basis of nutrients, productivity, and salinity, while cluster analysis further supports and clarifies seasonal and spatial patterns, giving a better insight into other features.

TL;DR: With the exception of impoundment fish, the association between altered land and the multiple-indicator scores based on the two water-quality indicators and the four biological indicators was stronger than that displayed by any of the individual variables.