Measuring the health of the Chesapeake Bay: Toward integration and prediction

The health of an ecosystem is a function of its vigor (useful productivity) , organization (complexity of interspecific interactions), and resilience ( ability to maintain itself in the face of disturbance). The health of the C hesapeake Bay ecosystem has deteriorated largely as a result of nutrient ov erenrichment, concomitant reduction in light availability, and loss of habi tats that provide complexity. This has resulted in an ecosystem that is a l ess vigorous producer of valuable fish and shellfish, less diverse and well organized, and more susceptible to and slower to recover from disturbances . It is not clear that degraded ecosystem health directly threatens human h ealth; in fact sanitation and reductions in loadings of potentially toxic s ubstances have reduced human health risks in recent decades. On the other h and, recently observed outbreaks of the toxin-producing dinoflagellate Pfie steria piscicida could be a result of deteriorated ecosystem health and pos e a human health risk. Monitoring of the environmental conditions, ecosyste m health, and human health risks is critically important to the adaptive ma nagement of the Chesapeake Bay. Although this monitoring has produced very useful information, monitoring can be more effective if it more directly ad dressed the multiple uses of the resulting information, applied new technol ogies, and were more effectively integrated across environmental media, amo ng resources, over space and time scales, and with modeling and research. ( C) 2000 Academic Press.