An Agenda for Studying Human and Ecosystem Health in the Boreal Forest

Ecosystem and human health assessment to define environmental management strategies: The case of long-term human impacts on an Arctic lake

Insect outbreaks are major drivers of natural disturbances in forest ecosystems. Outbreaks can have both direct and indirect effects on the composition of soil arthropod communities through canopy opening, nutrient addition and predator-prey interactions. In this study, we aimed to understand the effects of forest tent caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria; FTC) outbreaks through cascading effects on ant communities in both temperate and boreal forests in Canada. Pitfall traps and Berlese funnels were used to compare the ant communities, as well as the surrounding arthropod communities, between control and outbreak sites in boreal and temperate forests (in Quebec, Canada). Using the Sørensen dissimilarity index, we determined the alpha and beta diversity of the ant community. Other arthropods collected in the traps were counted to evaluate the richness and abundance of potential prey for the ants and other potential predators of the FTC. We used an indicator species analysis to examine the species associated with sites defoliated by the outbreak. In the boreal forest, we found that FTC outbreaks caused decreases in species richness and increases in the evenness of ant communities in defoliated sites. In the boreal forest sites, species composition varied significantly between control and outbreak sites. This pattern was driven in part by the presence of other predators. A similar, but weaker pattern was observed in the temperate forest. We saw no changes in the beta diversity in the boreal forest, but did see a significant decrease in the temperate forest between the outbreak sites and the control sites. Ant species in the boreal forest tended to exhibit a more marked preference for either control or previously defoliated sites than species in the temperate forest. Our study showed that disturbances such as insect outbreaks can drive changes in the ant community. While we saw small effects of outbreaks, manipulation experiments using resource addition could help us validate the mechanisms behind these relationships.

Environmental, human health, and ecosystem economic performance of long-term optimizing nitrogen management for wheat production

Using plastic products has become a daily habit of humans. Over the past 60 years, plastic production has increased ten-fold. If plastics continue to be produced and used, especially in the massive amounts as predicted, human and ecosystem health will be under threat of nano- and microplastic exposures and impacts. The impacts and risks of plastic pollution to human and ecosystem health will continue to increase if no significant action is taken to reduce the use of plastic products. Changing public thinking and human habits is not easy but doable. To tackle this long-term pollution problem, a systematic approach involving all parties including manufacturers, users, and environmental managers is needed. Enhancing education to increase knowledge, understanding, and awareness of potential ecosystem and human health impacts of plastic pollution by the public is critically important. The public can initiate actions and implement appropriate measures, when they fully understand the problem and realize that their actions could protect their health and the environment they are living in.

Promoting ecosystem and human health in urban areas using Green Infrastructure: A literature review

Ecosystem health is about a lot of things. It is about the state of a community of organisms (including humans as part of that community) that interact with their environment, sometimes in ways that compromise ecological functions, and in the process compromise the health of the entire ecosystem and its components. It is about questions of the relationship between the health of ecosystems and their integrity, i.e., how far they may diverge from a pristine state. It is also about human health — a topic that is receiving increased attention as issues of climate change, ozone depletion, food safety, exotic pathogens, and drinking water come to the fore. And at root it is about sustainability — that is, about the conditions necessary to sustain the functions of the ecosystem, the human community, and the other species that are totally dependent on those functions. The trend continues for more of the world’s population to be concentrated in urban areas (more than half the world’s population now lives in urban ecosystems, and in developed countries the percentage is substantially higher). Therefore, it is about the health of those systems and their interrelations with other ecosystems (forests, lakes, rivers, grasslands, etc.). Section I.2 provides a kaleidoscope of many of the philosophical, ethical, and practical issues that are part and parcel of the ecosystem health perspective. The chapter by Laura Westra examines the conceptual, historical, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of ecosystem health. Her chapter provides guidance in making a useful distinction between ecological integrity, which is oriented toward the preservation of unfettered nature, and ecosystem health, which is oriented toward preserving the functions of ecosystems, even though the system may be considerably altered as a result of human domination. The ethics of integrity (and ecosystem health) can be boiled down to this: if integrity (or, one might argue, ecosystem health) is basic for life, then the duty “to respect/protect life must come before all other obligations we might have, as no other good and no other right may be present, if life is absent.” Westra’s chapter goes on to explore the implications of this ethic, as well as to explore the relative strengths and the interface of ecosystem integrity and health. Both ecological integrity and ecosystem health are gaining in popularity as policy goals for environmental management.

The boreal forest is the second largest biome in the world containing 33% of the Earth's forest cover ([FAO 2001][1]) of which approximately 25% is natural. It is circumpolar and shares similar taxa across its range. It has approximately 20 300 identified species. Along with the tropics, the

The good functioning of aquatic ecosystems is essential for providing diverse ecosystem services that benefit humans. The degradation of ecosystem health due to continuous stressors, such as climate change or water pollution, is leading to an increase in human health risks and well-being. Indicators have been developed to determine human health risks from recreational and drinking water. Still, a general application to aquatic ecosystems linking ecosystem health and human health risks has not been done. We here reviewed indicators and indices applied to assess the health of aquatic ecosystems and their links with human health risk and well-being. We evaluated the extent to which indicators can witness a risk to human health and well-being. A total of 245 articles were reviewed, consisting of 185 on the assessment of aquatic ecosystem health and 60 linking ecosystem health and human health or well-being. Out of the 65 indices described, we evaluated the use of several parameters and their relevance to evaluate human health risks, including physico-chemical parameters, bioindicators, contaminants, and pathogens, therefore covering the various sources of ecosystem disturbance. Based on our assessment, we propose a set of indicators that would allow for the inclusion of risks for human health and well-being in the assessment of ecosystem health (e.g. coliforms, algae, pH, nutrients, chemical compounds, and ecosystem services). Measuring these parameters should be incorporated into future studies to allow an understanding of the linkage of ecosystem and human health.

Chapter 10 - Ecosystem Health and Human Health: Healthy Planet, Healthy Living

Climate change is perhaps one of the major critical problems of recent times. It has become a subject of international concern since its increase at an alarming speed. Although atmospheric gases, surface solar radiations, volcanic activity, cosmic rays and alterations in earth’s orbit are targeted as the potential causes of climate change, their consequences or impacts are not well documented. Sea level rise, flooding, extreme weather patterns, heat waves and drought are some of the pronounced consequences of climate change. Changes in biodiversity, ecosystem and ecosystem services and health caused by climate change have received minimal attention. A healthy ecosystem requires a wide diversity of microorganisms, plants and animals at different trophic levels. Removal of a single species from the niche or introduction of an invasive species might lead to ecosystem destruction. Abnormal changes in the climate pattern can alter the ecosystem health through loss of species, extinction of species, migration of species and changes in behavioural pattern. However, these changes are invisible till a species get extinct or endangered. Further the change in ecosystem health due to alterations in climate is difficult to record unlike other impacts. Sustainable practices that can reduce, sequester or capture the greenhouse gas emissions may halt the biodiversity loss, protect the ecosystem from further destruction and restore them. This chapter comprehensively describes the impacts of climate change on the health of various aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The detrimental effects, short- and long-term responses like changes in physiology, phenology and life cycle of organisms, loss of productivity and loss or migration of species have also been elaborated in detail for every single ecosystem.

A systems-level model of direct and indirect links between environmental health, socioeconomic factors, and human mortality

Human health and ecological assessment programs for Hebei Spirit oil spill accident of 2007: Status, lessons, and future challenges

Introduction. Interconnections between human and ecosystem health: opening lines of comunication. Part 1: Mechanistic Linkages. Ah receptors and the mechanism of dioxin toxicity: insights from homology and phylogeny. Comparative studies of molecular mechanisms of tumorigenesis in herbicide-exposed bivalves. Emerging issues: the effects of endocrine disrupters on reproductive development. Part 2: empirical evidence for linkages. The Great Lakes: a model for golbal concern. Establishing possible links between aquatic ecosystem health and human health: an integrated approach. Part 3: interdependence between human and ecosystem health. Ecosystems as buffers to human health. Interfacing product life cycles and ecological assimilative capacity. Part 4: the risk assessment program. Ecological and human health risk assessment: a comparion. Toxicological and biostatistical foundations for the derivation of a generic interspecies uncertainty factor for application in non-carcinogen risk assessment. Ecological risk assessment and sustainable environmental management. Part 5: socioeconomic and psychological perspectives. Measuring economic values for ecosystems. Perceptions of risk to humans and to nature: a research plan. Perceptions of ecosystem health, stress and human well-being. Part 6: permeation into literature. Ecocriticism: literary studies in an age of environmental crisis. The literature of toxicity from Rachel Carson to Ana Castillo. Synthesis. Ecosystem degradation: links to human health. Index.

The climate crisis presents an urgent challenge for Earth's living creatures and the habitats in which they have been adapted to thrive. Climate-related stress presents risks to microorganisms, the stability of the functions they provide, and their maintenance of beneficial interactions with their hosts and ecosystems. Microbes move across the continuum of anthropogenic influence on Earth's ecosystems, from pristine to human-managed to fully urbanized environments. Because microbial feedback within and across this continuum exists at multiple, connected scales from molecules to ecosystem-level processes, predicting microbial responses to climate stress and their potentially wide-ranging consequences remains difficult. Here, we discuss the broad implications of microbial and microbiome responses to climate change as they interface with human, plant, and ecosystem health. For each section on human, plant and ecosystem health, we briefly discuss the state of knowledge for each and follow with proposed future research, including some directions that are promising but require more work to evaluate. We end by considering overarching microbial ecology research needs across these systems and microbial solutions under investigation as possible climate-resilient interventions to maintain human, plant, and ecosystem health. This work draws on diverse expertise to identify broad research directions across typically separated disciplines and builds a holistic framework for considering their interrelationships.

Theatre of Alliances?Role-play, Representation, and Ecosystem Health in Ecuador Jennifer Beth Spiegel (bio) and Annalee Yassi (bio) The ecosystem approach to human health attempts to develop community capacity to address environmental health concerns by crossing disciplinary boundaries and promoting equity and widespread participation. Role-play, a technique increasingly used in other training programs, is now being used in programs to promote ecosystem health. Here we analyze a socio-dramatization recently used in Ecuador in an ecosystem health-training course. We explore the complexities that must be addressed in order to foster the use of this technique to achieve its intended progressive objectives. Drawing on Spivak's distinction between political representation and artistic representation, we analyze some of the issues encountered in using role-play to facilitate understanding of politically charged environmental health issues with an intercultural and interdisciplinary group. We highlight the successes achieved, but conclude that without adequate guidance in understanding and deconstructing the archetypes and actions presented by the group, the full scope of the lessons that role-play has to offer remain untapped. We therefore finish by noting that expertise in performance techniques for community empowerment and cultural emancipation would be a useful addition to interdisciplinary teams endeavoring to promote ecosystem and human health using theatrical techniques. Introduction Over the last decade a new approach, called an "ecosystem approach to human health," has emerged among environmental health researchers and practitioners. This approach understands health as the culmination of various social, cultural, economic, and biophysical factors. The philosophy governing the ecosystem approach to human health is that the skills, concerns, and understandings of those who comprise, influence, and live within a given ecosystem form the basis of initiatives to address health issues. As such, this approach seeks to facilitate productive encounters among members of a community, building on what has been dubbed the "three pillars" of this approach: transdisciplinarity, equity, and participation.1 In 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) engaged a team of environmental health experts to develop new training materials to better prepare the workforce needed to apply this emerging holistic approach to promoting environmental health. In keeping with the need to build skills in fostering understanding between diverse groups and to promote participation, the teaching materials developed utilize an interactive approach to learning (Yassi et al.).2 One of the key techniques promoted in the new curriculum was role-play to assist students from a wide variety of disciplinary, social, and cultural backgrounds to understand the perspective of the various stakeholders in addressing environmental health concerns. Recently, a Canadian-led international team of environmental health promoters, medical epidemiologists, and policy experts working with local counterparts launched an innovative program in Ecuador to train people to address environmental health problems in communities. The "International Masters in Health Utilizing an Ecosystem Health Approach," which was the core of the program as discussed later in this essay, began with a two-week workshop. A central exercise in [End Page 129] this workshop was the performance of a dramatization of the situation regarding Texaco's oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon. While this exercise appeared to the instructors to be an effective means of engaging participants in active collaboration, the extent to which it served as a useful vehicle to facilitate the exchange of knowledge among members of the group and promote alliances for problem-solving was less clear. The lead instructor (co-author AY) therefore engaged a critical theorist with expertise in performance techniques (co-author JBS) to review the materials, examine the photos and video of the role-play, and help make sense of what transpired. The analysis that emerged prompted reflections upon the various aims of the ecosystem approach to health, and both the possibilities of role-play and the challenges with its use that must be addressed if this technique is to be employed to help meet the objectives of an ecosystem health approach. The central objective of this essay, therefore, is to explore the challenges in using role-play to facilitate understanding of the complexities in addressing a given environmental health issue, and to reflect on how to use this technique more effectively to promote ecosystem health. We begin with a brief...