Ecological Health Index

The Ecological Health Index (EHI) is the scientific backbone beneath EcoIntel’s Land Health Score. It was published by Xu, Rowntree, Borrelli, Hodbod and Raven in 2019 in the journal Environments: a visual field-assessment method built as fifteen indicators that map onto the four ecosystem processes of Holistic Management, scored as the departure of a site from a reference area representing the land’s ideal state, and summed into a single index. In the original study it was tested across forty-four farms covering almost four hundred thousand hectares.

The EHI matters because it is a published, field-validated way of turning the four ecosystem flows, scored against a local reference, into one number for the condition of land. It is the point where the academic science of ecosystem health and the practitioner tradition of field assessment meet in a single peer-reviewed instrument.

EcoIntel computes a remotely-sensed extension of the EHI: the same four-process, departure-from-reference logic, read from satellite and other open data rather than scored by eye in the field, so it can run on every parcel, every year, back to 2018. The EHI is the scientifically precise number; the EcoDynamic Index (EDX) is that science normalised and banded onto the legible 1 to 9 Land Health Score.