rangeland ecosystems shift across dynamic thresholds between differentecological states in response to natural or human-induced factors. these differentecological states are the result of interactions among climate, soils, grazing history,and management practices. the notion of a single ‘‘pristine’’ final state is onlyconceptual in nature, and because of this, dynamic thresholds and the effects...

A key challenge of ecosystem management is determining how to manage multiple ecosystem services across landscapes. Enhancing important provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and timber, often leads to tradeoffs between regulating and cultural ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling, flood protection, and tourism. We developed a framework for analyzing the provision of multiple ecos...

Dramatic changes in ecosystem services have motivated recent work characterizing their interactions, including identifying trade-offs and synergies. Although time is arguably implicit in these ideas of trade-offs and synergies (e.g., temporal dynamics or changes in ecosystem services), such interactions are routinely inferred based on the spatial relationships among ecosystem services alone (e....

The ability to understand and ultimately predict ecosystem response to multiple pressures is paramount to successfully implement ecosystem-based management. Thresholds shifts and nonlinear patterns in ecosystem responses can be used to determine reference points that identify levels of a pressure that may drastically alter ecosystem status, which can inform management action. However, quantifyi...

The industrial system operates through different principles of system development than the ecosystem. Industrial ecology can be a fruitful metaphor for facilitating the development of industrial systems toward the principles of system development of ecosystems. In this paper the industrial ecosystem analogy includes the four ecosystem principles of roundput, diversity, locality and gradual chan...

Marine ecosystem is a complex nonlinear system. However, ecosystem health assessment conventionally builds on a linear superposition of changes in ecosystem components and probably fails to evaluate nonlinear interactions among various components. To better reflect the intrinsic interactions and their impacts on ecosystem health, an ecosystem coordination index, defined as the matching level of...