The term ecosystem health has been employed to embrace some suite of environmental goals deemed desirable.[15] Edward Grumbine’s highly cited paper[16] “What is ecosystem management?” surveyed ecosystem management and ecosystem health literature and summarized frequently encountered goal statements:
Conserving viable populations of native species
Conserving ecosystem diversity
Maintaining evolutionary and ecological processes
Managing over long time frames to maintain evolutionary potential
Accommodating human use and occupancy within these constraints
Grumbine describes each of these goals as a “value statement” and stresses the role of human values in setting ecosystem management goals.
It is the last goal mentioned in the survey, accommodating humans, that is most contentious. “We have observed that when groups of stakeholders work to define … visions, this leads to debate over whether to emphasize ecosystem health or human well-being … Whether the priority is ecosystems or people greatly influences stakeholders’ assessment of desirable ecological and social states.”[17] and, for example, “For some, wolves are critical to ecosystem health and an essential part of nature, for others they are a symbol of government overreach threatening their livelihoods and cultural values.”[18]
Measuring ecosystem health requires extensive goal-driven environmental sampling. For example, a vision for ecosystem health of Lake Superior was developed by a public forum and a series of objectives were prepared for protection of habitat and maintenance of populations of some 70 indigenous fish species.[19] A suite of 80 lake health indicators was developed for the Great Lakes Basin including monitoring native fish species, exotic species, water levels, phosphorus levels, toxic chemicals, phytoplankton, zooplankton, fish tissue contaminants, etc.[20]
Some authors have attempted broad definitions of ecosystem health, such as benchmarking as healthy the historical ecosystem state “prior to the onset of anthropogenic stress.”[21] A difficulty is that the historical composition of many human-altered ecosystems is unknown or unknowable. Also, fossil and pollen records indicate that the species that occupy an ecosystem reshuffle through time, so it is difficult to identify one snapshot in time as optimum or “healthy.”.[22]
A commonly cited broad definition states that a healthy ecosystem has three attributes:
productivity,
resilience, and
"organization" (including biodiversity).[21]