Assessing and monitoring ecological integrity in parks and protected areas

Increasingly, resource managers and ecologists are faced with the problem of defining the state of an ecosystem relative to defined management endpoints. This study develops a monitoring and assessment framework to understand the ecosystem integrity of an area, with particular reference to parks and protected areas. The thesis is that ecological integrity is at least partially a scientific concept and ecosystem science can be used to monitor and assess the state of ecosystem integrity. A case study is presented demonstrating the assessment of ecological integrity in Fundy National Park in New Brunswick.;The monitoring and assessment framework developed in this study goes beyond specific-threat monitoring to examine the state of the ecosystem from an integrated or system perspective. As such, the monitoring and assessment framework accounts for the cumulative impacts of many individual stressors. The development of the framework is based upon the inherent hierarchical nature of ecosystems. There is a need to assess both structure and function at a range of spatial and temporal scales. I examined different schools of ecology that aim to understand ecological impacts, but at a variety of scales. The schools, including stress ecology, conservation biology and landscape ecology, were examined for promising measures of ecological integrity. A composite list of measures was chosen from the schools, based on a defined set of monitoring and assessment criteria.;The measures were applied to a case study in Fundy National Park, New Brunswick. Data was collected from a variety a sources to examine levels of human disturbance, changes in species richness, changes in rates of succession and reterogression, the ability of the system to conserve nutrients, reproductive rates of indicator species, landscape fragmentation and population viability of indicator species. Each of these measures was assessed against a defined reference value. The resulting combination of measures gives a picture of an ecosystem that has undergone significant ecological degradation and that degradation is likely to continue in the absence of management intervention. The monitoring and assessment framework provides a ecologically based, operational scheme to understand to state of ecological integrity in parks and protected areas.