These aspects, however, merge when we remove marine space by putting in land claim for urban expansion. this website Most importantly, this separation of the pressures affecting marine systems allows us to know and appreciate for human activities what, why and how we can and cannot manage. We have to ensure that we have robust and defendable science to

assess marine health and underpin marine management, hence be aware of the THREE aspects of science methodology – that we should define our Aims, as the big idea in the science, list our Objectives, as what we need to do to reach our Aims, and give our Hypotheses, as testable and scientifically rigorous questions. Following this, we can suggest there are THREE types of significance in our findings – firstly, and most easy to determine as long as we have sufficient data, is statistical significance. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is ecological or SB431542 price environmental significance, and thirdly we have the social significance of any change that we detect. For example, detecting the loss of a species amongst hundreds would be impossible statistically without a large and powerful statistical sampling design but that lost species could be ecologically relevant. Despite this, we might not be able to statistically

or ecologically detect a change because of noise (inherent variability) in the system but if society thinks a change has occurred then it should have the highest significance (see Gray and Elliott, 2009). If society thinks there is a problem then by definition there is one even if science cannot detect it. Consequently, The

Ecosystem Approach relies on good and proportionate many (fit-for-purpose) science to provide an ecosystem health assessment (or monitoring) programme consisting of FOUR elements – (i) an analysis of main processes and structural characteristics of ecosystem; (ii) an identification of known or potential stressors; (iii) the development of hypotheses about how those stressors may affect each ecosystem; and (iv) the identification of measures of environmental quality and ecosystem health to test hypotheses. In managing the environment we can no longer just be concerned with single sciences – for example, we can take ideas from the business literature which suggests that the environment of an organisation is summarised by the FOUR categories of PEST (Political, Economical, Social and Technological constraints) ( Palmer and Hartley, 2008). This has been expanded to the PESTLE analysis which includes the FIFTH, Legal aspect. We can then juxtapose this to reinforce the idea that the organisation and management of an environment is subjected to the same constraints. This recognises that while as natural scientists we may want to emphasise the natural science, we have to be aware of (and work with) wider disciplines.