Ecosystem Condition: The Metric Everyone Cites and Nobody Agrees On
Session Description
Echo Labs hosted this workshop to explore what "good enough" definitions of Ecosystem Condition could look like in practice, led by Phil Wilkes, current Research Leader at Kew Gardens and Echo's incoming Director of Ecological Research. Rather than debating the concept in the abstract, the session anchored discussion in specific use cases, a farmer managing a single holding, a government triaging ecosystem collapse across a region, and a fund manager structuring a nature credit, and asked attendees to work through what "condition" means in each context. Groups worked through end-user requirements, technical measurement choices, and the tensions between the two, before reconvening to identify points of convergence across the room.
Speakers
Kaja Wasik, CEO, Echo Laboratories
Phil Wilkes, Research Leader, RBG Kew / Echo Labs
Molly Blank, CTO, Echo Labs
Tosca Tindall, Co-Founder, Director of Product, Echo Labs
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Ecosystem condition metrics need to be inherently multi-scale and multi-stakeholder; no group arrived at a single metric serving a single audience.
Remote sensing was positioned as a "tip-and-cue" tool: useful for flagging where to look, with ground-level sampling then confirming what's actually happening in those areas.
Groups converged on relative, time-zero (t₀) baselines rather than idealized reference states as the more realistic approach to tracking condition over time.
Frequency, not measurement scope, was identified as the biggest current gap; existing monitoring frameworks often lag by months or years.
A related definitional debate surfaced around "trajectory" versus "rate of change" as terms, both used to describe the same underlying goal without a clear shared definition.
The mapping between raw ecological metrics (species assemblages, soil microbial communities, vegetation structure) and the simpler, decision-ready indicators that funders, regulators, and land managers need is not well established.
Soil health measures came up repeatedly across all groups as a desirable indicator, alongside consistent budget constraints on what's practically implementable.
Relevant Reading
Exploring “good enough” definitions of Ecosystem Condition (Link HERE)
