Research results in the field of applied and systems ecology at RSHU

The authors’ point of view on formation and development of applied ecology at RSHU is given. The article contains a brief overview of research results over the past 20 years in the field of applied ecology. The main directions of research of the Department of Applied and Systems Ecology are presented: consideration of features of environmental information during the processing of observation data, development of theory and methods of assessment of pollution in rivers and reservoirs, ecological and hydrometeorological problems of large cities and industrial areas, quality management of the urban environment, mathematical modeling of water body ecosystems, monitoring and assessment of the ecological status of marine ecosystems. The issues of international cooperation of the Department with foreign and Russian organizations are highlighted. One of the challenges that require making immediate decision in environment quality assessment is criterion selection for estimation the ecological condition, status or ambient quality standard. To solve this problem, it is proposed to use the method of integral assessment of the sustainability and health of marine and freshwater ecosystems, which can characterize the ecological status of the aquatic ecosystems as a whole. On the basis of synthesis of existing approaches to assessing the sustainability and ecosystem health, the choice of models and methods for their quantitative integral assessment is justified. An integral indicator of the sustainability of marine and freshwater ecosystems, as well as a training model-classification have been developed to calculate integral indices, which allow to classify various aquatic areas according to the classes of sustainability and ecosystem health. In addition, recommendations have been proposed to improve standard methods of water quality assessment based on hydrochemical data and to reduce environmental risk for sustainable development of urban areas.