Many of these services are directly related to the flow and function of water and its constituents within watersheds. climate regulation, flood regulation and water purification) and cultural services, such as recreation and spiritual activities (de Groot et al., 2002 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). food, water, wood, fibre and fuel), regulating services (e.g. soil formation, nutrients and primary production), provisioning goods and services (e.g. Watersheds provide a range of ecosystem services that are valued by the society (Costanza et al., 1997, 2014 TEEB 2010). River Research and Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Moreover, the approach can be iteratively applied and improved as new data and information become available. An advantage of this approach is that the index can be readily deconstructed to identify factors influencing index scores, thereby directly supporting the strategic adaptive management of individual components that contribute to watershed integrity.
This approach can then be used to model and map watershed integrity by incorporating risk factors (human-related alterations or stressors) that have been explicitly shown to interfere with and degrade key functions in watersheds. To operationalize this definition as an assessment tool, we identify key functions of unimpaired watersheds.
#Integrity plus management san diego full#
Our definition of watershed ‘integrity’ is the capacity of a watershed to support and maintain the full range of ecological processes and functions essential to the sustainability of biodiversity and of the watershed resources and services provided to society. In addition, current assessments of endpoints do not indicate the source of impairment. These scales are inappropriate for defining integrity at the watershed scale. Definitions of ‘integrity’ have been developed for river ecosystems, but mainly at the reach or site scale and usually for particular species, such as fish or macroinvertebrates. atmospheric deposition of anthropogenically derived nitrogen), truly unaltered conditions for most, if not all, watersheds cannot be described. Additionally, given the ubiquity of human-related alterations across landscapes (e.g. However, assessments can be hampered because natural settings of many systems differ from those sites used to characterize reference conditions. Often these assessments are performed in comparison with a reference condition.
An array of indicators is used by natural resource managers, both private and government, to assess watersheds and their sub-components. Their ability to provide these services depends, in part, on the degree to which they are impaired by human-related activity. They are social–ecological systems that provide a range of ecosystem services valued by the society. Watersheds are spatially explicit landscape units that contain a range of interacting physical, ecological and social attributes.
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