Auditing the health of Australia's ecosystems

The Australian Government has made a commitment to a National Land and Wate r Resources Audit (Audit) to provide data, analysis, and appraisal of natur al resource management and to facilitate improved decision making at a rang e of scales. One of the themes within the Audit is ecosystem health. This a rticle describes the goals of the Audit with respect to ecosystem health an d provides examples of how these goals are being realized in terms of proje cts. Six projects within the ecosystem health theme of the Audit are descri bed. Benefits of the ecosystem health paradigm have been recognized by the Audit in comparison to previous natural resource assessment methods that te nded to focus on single components of ecosystems through the use of environ mental quality indicators and often failed to make distinctions and linkage s between ecosystem types. A "catchment to estuary" concept which identifie s the linkages between landscape, catchment, waterway, and estuarine condit ion is providing the rationale behind the process-based integration of natu ral resource data sets which form the basis of methods being developed by t he Audit. This depends upon the identification of key ecosystem process dri vers and a range of attributes by which they may be measured at appropriate scales. The Audit's aim is to develop purpose-driven multiattribute assess ment frameworks that can incorporate a range of available natural resource information along with social and economic data to provide a measure of dis tance of ecosystems from some desired state. The contributions of other Aud it theme projects to such assessments and the final integrated reporting re quirements of the Audit across disciplinary themes is described. Perceived benefits of the ecosystem health approach to natural resource assessment an d tests of effectiveness that may be used by the Audit are also discussed.