Are there tools to help us develop ecological and socioeconomic indicators for monitoring?
Indicators are quantitative or qualitative measures that provide information about the status of or changes in ecological or socioeconomic aspects of an ecosystem. Many structural and functional properties of ecosystems are difficult to measure directly (e.g. community well-being), so easier-to-measure indicators (e.g. cost of housing relative to average income) serve as proxies for the difficult-to-measure properties. Monitoring indicators and protocols have been developed for a wide variety of coastal and marine systems. The Coastal Indicators Information Exchange website provides a great resource for learning about existing coastal indicator work and determining if new efforts can build on existing work. When developing new indicators is called for, ecosystem models provide a means of selecting optimal indicators. In a model ecosystem, BOTH potential indicators and the changes in ecosystem structure and function that the indicators are meant to track can be measured, and the perform
