Studying Birds as Indicators of Ecosystem Health

"How can you tell where a tiny forage fish like the sand lance spends its days? Look at what’s eating it.

Popular recreational and commercial fishing species such as Atlantic cod, halibut, flounder and monkfish rely on sand lance as a staple of their diets. These forage fish are also on the menus for predators like humpback whales and many kinds of seabirds, including the great shearwater. However, sand lance are moderately vulnerable to changes in ocean and climate patterns, especially warming seas and ocean acidification. "The numbers of these forage fish (sand lance) fluctuate and have been relatively low in the past few years," explains David Wiley, research coordinator for Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Over the past several years, sanctuary scientists have been studying great shearwater populations to better understand the availability of food like the sand lance throughout the sanctuary..."
Birds and ecosystem health

Report to the President - Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy
"The central messages of this report are two. First, the economic and environmental dimensions of soci­etal well­being are both indispensable, as well as tightly intertwined. Second, even as the government is rightly focused on the direct threats to the economic aspects of well­being in the form of recession, unemployment, and the stagnation of the standard of living of the middle class, it must not fail to address the threats to both the environmental and the economic aspects of well­being that derive from the accelerating degradation of the environmental capital—the Nation’s ecosystems and the biodiversity they contain—from which flow “ecosystem services” underpinning much economic activity as well as public health, safety, and environmental quality..."