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FRom Pickle Jars to Ecosystem Services: Who Cares About Water Fleas Anyway?
Citation:
MUNNS, JR., W. R. FRom Pickle Jars to Ecosystem Services: Who Cares About Water Fleas Anyway? Presented at SETAC North American 14th Annual Meeting, Bar Harbor, ME, June 05 - 06, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
This dinnertime keynote presentation is intended to convey the directions that environmental research is taking to be more effective in supporting environmental management decisions. The presentation focuses on two recent developments: population-level ecological risk assessment, and inclusion of ecosystem services into management considerations.
Description:
We’ve made tremendous progress in protecting the environment since Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burned in 1969 – the air, water and land of this country are cleaner due in major part to the kinds of science represented by SETAC. And yet, the environment continues to take a back seat to human health issues in many important decisions. Because humans are the deciders when it comes to environmental protection, our science can be made more influential by casting environmental effects in terms that people care most about: valued ecological properties and human well being. Two developments – one recent and one not so much – are helping to shape the future research agenda for environmental protection. The first is an expansion of consideration beyond death and reproduction of easily tested lab organisms to the risks that stressors present to real populations, communities and ecosystems. By sliding attention further along the scale of biological hierarchy, population-level ecological risk assessment provides evidence that can be linked more directly to the things we value: the vitality of ecosystems around us. Who cares if 50% of the Daphnia die in a pickle jar, when the real goal is a healthy lake community with frogs for catching and fish for eating? We can better inform the decisions to meet such goals by furthering the progress of the science and knowledge needed to assess risks to populations. The second development takes this decidedly anthropocentric perspective further still by concentrating on ecosystem goods and services – the outputs of ecological functions and processes that directly or indirectly contribute to social welfare (or have the potential to do so in the future). New concepts, approaches and tools are needed to evaluate the outcomes of various environmental management options in terms of their influence on the delivery of ecosystem services. We’ll want to become more interdisciplinary as a Society to include the ecological, social, economic, and decision science perspectives required to support environmental decisions effectively. The game no longer is an insolated one of protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but rather is one played on an expanded field of the entire social-environmental system. By shifting our attention from classical toxicological endpoints to those reflecting societal values and human well being more directly, SETAC science will continue to play a primary role in environmental protection.