Ecosystem management is an integrative, adaptive method for planning and implementing interventions in ecological systems to sustain or restore their structure, function, composition, and services over the long term. It emphasizes system-level objectives, such as maintaining biodiversity, ecological integrity, and resilience, rather than optimizing single components or outputs. Methodologically, it combines ecological modeling, long-term monitoring, stakeholder involvement, and scenario-based decision analysis within an adaptive management cycle of hypothesis-driven actions and iterative evaluation. Ecosystem management explicitly incorporates spatial heterogeneity, cross-scale ecological processes, and uncertainty, and often uses tools such as GIS-based landscape analysis, environmental indicators, and decision-support systems to guide management actions and evaluate trade-offs among competing ecological and socio-economic goals.
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