Ecological modellers may be deterred from using object-oriented programming languages by reports of the inherent rigidity of the object-oriented formulation, giving rise to a poor representation of biotic interaction. Internal approaches of imitating relationships between the components of an ecological model bury the associated code inside the object declarations of one or more of these compon...

Increasingly on a worldwide scale, legislation has been adopted to determine the ecological integrity of surface waters including streams, rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters. An integral part of determining ecological integrity is the measurement of biological integrity, typically emphasizing analyses of plankton, benthos, macroalgae and fish. In the development of protocols for evalua...

Recently, Borja et al. (2008b) published an overview of integrationing and status of the ecosystem, and have been widely pertive tools and methods for assessing ecological integrity in estuarine and coastal systems worldwide. This contribution collates the presentations and ideas debated among the attendees of the special session on ‘Integrative tools and methods in assessing ecological integri...

A fundamental premise of landscape ecology is that finer-scaled local ecological integrity is directly influenced by larger-scaled land use patterns. Therefore, characterizing landscape patterns that are mapped from satellite imagery may provide valuable covariate information about average integrity “on the ground”. This conjecture was evaluated in Pennsylvania for 102 watersheds where land cov...

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) occur across most of the world's drylands and are sensitive indicators of dryland degradation. Accounting for shifts in biocrust composition is important for quantifying integrity of arid and semi-arid ecosystems, but the best methods for assessing biocrusts are uncertain. We investigate the utility of surveying biocrust morphogroups, a reduced set of biotic c...