Monitoring, Assessing and Reporting Upon Ecological Change: Implications for Planning and Management‪.‬

Overview Governments, agencies, and organizations and people at all levels have a strong need and desire to understand the state of the ecosystems which they are charged with protecting. This paper summarizes four different approaches to monitoring and reporting the state of ecosystems and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. The paper then discusses common issues or problems that pertain to each of the approaches. The critical questions are: can we really understand ecosystems anyway; what scales should be used for reporting; who makes the value assessments on the state of the ecosystem; can heritage agencies be expected to monitor themselves; and finally what action can be tied tied to the results of a monitoring report? It is concluded more effort is required to produce accurate, repeatable and necessary assessments of ecosystem condition.