Anthropogenic activity has a negative impact on many coastal ecosystems, compromising the significant direct and indirect socio-economic benefits provided in these areas. Maintaining activities that depend on coastal zones while preserving the ecological state of the ecosystems represents a management challenge. Management of coastal zones requires scientifically based knowledge, due to the com...

PURPOSE: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is striving to design, evaluate, and manage its large-scale engineering projects in a sustainable, environmental context that extends beyond traditional project boundaries. This approach, which frames a project as part of a larger, functioning ecosystem, was articulated in “The Environmental Operating Principles” by the Chief of Engineers (Flowe...

Ecosystem approaches to natural resource management are seen as a way to provide better outcomes for ecosystems and for people, yet the nature and strength of interactions among ecosystem components is usually unknown. Here we characterize the economic benefits of ecological knowledge through a simple model of fisheries that target a predator (piscivore) and its prey. We solve for the managemen...

Real food chains are very rarely investigated since long data sequences are required. Typically, if we consider that an ecosystem evolves with a period corresponding to the time for maturation, possessing few dozen of cycles would require to count species over few centuries. One well known example of a long data set is the number of Canadian lynx furs caught by the Hudson Bay company between 18...

Assessments of flow reduction in streams often focus on changes to biological communities and in-stream physical characteristics, with little consideration for changes in ecosystem functioning. It is unclear whether functional indicators of ecosystem condition may be useful for assessing the impacts of reduced discharge on small streams. Using weirs and diversions to reduce stream discharge dur...