land degradation & development

Land Degrad. Develop. 17: 233 (2006)

BOOK REVIEW

HANDBOOK OF ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS FORASSESSMENT OF ECOSYSTEM HEALTH, edited by S.E. Jørgensen, R. Costanza and F.-L. Xu. CRC Press, BocaRaton, FL, and London, 2005. ISBN 1 56670 665 3, £79.99(hardback), xviiiþ 439 pp.

The impressive description on the book’s back cover pre-pares the reader for a comprehensive and practical analysisof the theoretical, methodological and contextual applica-tions of the increasingly popular field of ecosystem healthand associated indicators. The cover goes on to describehow there is a wide coverage of ecosystems and a discussionof advantages and disadvantages for each indicator type.The book contains seventeen chapters and considers a widerange of indices from those at species, community andecosystem level, including those based on thermodynamicprinciples. However, the actual content of the Handbook ofEcological Indicators for Assessment of Ecosystem Healthis a startling disappointment.

There is a clear lack of editorial control, with a barelylogical sequence to the contributions (no clear theoretical ormethodological progression). A case in point is the classi-fication and description of the various indices currently inuse. Attempts at classification are made in almost half of thecontributions, with Chapter 2 supposedly acting as the bookoverview, although only a handful of chapters are quoted init and all the examples are based on aquatic ecosystems. Thevarious classifications rarely match and when they do, itcomes across as unnecessary repetition. There are radicaldifferences in chapter length (some chapters are only sevenpages long, while others reach thirty-six pages), and quality(many chapters are riddled with grammatical and typogra-phical errors). For a field that ought to have a wide range ofapplications, the book has an overwhelming focus on aqua-tic ecosystems (ten out of seventeen chapters). This issurprising considering the great difficulty in collectingquantifiable information from these systems. There is onlyone chapter, Chapter 11, which is solely dedicated to aterrestrial case study, where thermodynamic indices areproposed for agro-ecosystems. There is no concludingchapter, so the readers are left empty-handed with respect

to an assessment of future development in this wide-rangingfield.

The overall level of the book is certainly not aimed atenvironmental managers and practitioners as is claimed.Instead, the book is almost entirely tailored for the academiccommunity. Some chapters provide great detail on themathematical derivation of complex fractal-based indices,while others propose indices that are speculative anduntested. Only a few chapters undertake a considerationof the social issues associated with the use and interpretationof indicators, arguably the most significant constraintlimiting the widespread application of ecosystem healthindicators.

There are a few chapters that should be specificallymentioned. Chapters 4, 16 and 17 provide excellent over-views of the use of indices within North American andEuropean lake and estuarine ecosystems. These also includean insight into the difficult task of stakeholder engagement.Chapters 12, 14 and 15 are comprehensive and cleardescriptions of the application of thermodynamic andmass indicators of ecosystem health, bringing us right upto date with this promising area of research. Together thesethree chapters provide an overview of the practical applica-tions of systems ecology, with exciting demonstrations ofthe use of concepts such as emergy, exergy and materialflows in ecosystem health indices. My sympathies are withthese chapter authors and the immense effort they haveshown in communicating such an exciting field to a wideraudience. It is regrettable that the rest of the book does notlive up to the same standards.

ANDREA BERARDIOpen Systems Research Group

Systems DepartmentFaculty of TechnologyThe Open UniversityMilton Keynes, UK

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com).

DOI: 10.1002/ldr.729

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.