Ecosystem-based management to assess the functional biodiversity of an ecosystem: a stepping stone to ecosystem resilience estimation

Background/Question/Methods

Within recent years, biodiversity has been the focus for most national and international management in marine waters. The rapid loss of species has made the conservation of species the target for larger management schemes such as the European Unions’ Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). In the private sector, this has yielded an increasing interest from marine operators and stakeholders for operations to have net-positive biodiversity impacts/effects. Furthermore, the topic of biodiversity has also taken root in the public eye. However, in contrast to terrestrial ecosystem management, marine -based biodiversity assessment is still in its infancy but clearly focus of ongoing method development. Thus, the term ‘biodiversity’ for marine ecosystems is only loosely related to the number of species in a specific ecosystem, rather than an element for ecosystem structure and functioning assuring its resilience. To anchor the wish for increasing biodiversity in an ecosystem context, the current study aims to conciliate a range of biodiversity measures and indicators with ecosystem structure and functioning to enable marine operators, stakeholders and managers to assess the wider effects of biodiversity actions in an ecosystem context.

Results/Conclusions

Using long-term monitoring data from the North Sea seabed, we have analyzed species compositions using standard indicators such as Margaleffs d and AMBI-index, along with the species network analysis with approaches such as Structured Equation Models. MSFD descriptor (xyz) were computed and combined to show the overall Environmental status score. Subsequently, the results of each measure were related to corresponding ecosystem functioning? components, resulting in an overall spatio-temporal estimate of ecosystem resilience. Any identified changes were related to anthropogenic activities in the North Sea i.e. energy sector activities. The results showed that it was possible to use a composite of biodiversity measures to assess ecosystem resilience. Where the transferability and sensitivity of the method still needs to be tested by conducting similar analysis in other study areas. However, the method shows promising results as a baseline tool for marine operators, stakeholders and managers to enable to assess the effect of biodiversity actions and thereby providing a stepping stone to ecosystem resilience estimation.