Auditing the health of Australia's ecosystems

The Australian Government has made a commitment to a National Land and Water Resources Audit (Audit) to provide data, analysis, and appraisal of natural resource management and to facilitate improved decision making at a range of scales. One of the themes within the Audit is ecosystem health. This article describes the goals of the Audit with respect to ecosystem health and provides examples of how these goals are being realized in terms of projects. Six projects within the ecosystem health theme of the Audit are described. Benefits of the ecosystem health paradigm have been recognized by the Audit in comparison to previous natural resource assessment methods that tended to focus on single components of ecosystems through the use of environmental quality indicators and often failed to make distinctions and linkages between ecosystem types. A "catchment to estuary" concept which identifies the linkages between landscape, catchment, waterway, and estuarine condition is providing the rationale behind the process-based integration of natural resource data sets which form the basis of methods being developed by the Audit. This depends upon the identification of key ecosystem process drivers and a range of attributes by which they may be measured at appropriate scales. The Audit's aim is to develop purpose-driven multiattribute assessment frameworks that can incorporate a range of available natural resource information along with social and economic data to provide a measure of distance of ecosystems from some desired state. The contributions of other Audit theme projects to such assessments and the final integrated reporting requirements of the Audit across disciplinary themes is described. Perceived benefits of the ecosystem health approach to natural resource assessment and tests of effectiveness that may be used by the Audit are also discussed.