10.4: Ecosystem Services
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Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Functioning healthy ecosystems offer such things as natural pollination of crops, clean air, extreme weather mitigation, and human mental and physical well-being. Collectively, these benefits are becoming known as ecosystem services, and are often integral to the provision of food, the provisioning of clean drinking water, the decomposition of wastes, and the resilience and productivity of food ecosystems.
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Many ecologists also believe that the provision of ecosystem services can be stabilized with biodiversity. Increasing biodiversity also benefits the variety of ecosystem services available to society. Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and an ecosystem's stability is essential to the management of natural resources and their services.
Types of Ecosystem Services
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a major UN-sponsored effort to analyze the impact of human actions on ecosystems and human well-being, identified four major categories of ecosystem services: provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services.
Provisioning Services: When people are asked to identify a service provided by nature, most think of food. Fruits, vegetables, trees, fish, and livestock are available to us as direct products of ecosystems. A provisioning service is any type of benefit to people that can be extracted from nature. Along with food, other types of provisioning services include drinking water, timber, wood fuel, natural gas, oils, plants that can be made into clothes and other materials, and medicinal benefits.
Regulating Services: Ecosystems provide many of the basic services that make life possible for people. Plants clean air and filter water, bacteria decompose wastes, bees pollinate flowers, and tree roots hold soil in place to prevent erosion. All these processes work together to make ecosystems clean, sustainable, functional, and resilient to change. A regulating service is the benefit provided by ecosystem processes that moderate natural phenomena. Regulating services include pollination, decomposition, water purification, erosion and flood control, and carbon storage and climate regulation.
Cultural Services: As we interact and alter nature, the natural world has in turn altered us. It has guided our cultural, intellectual, and social development by being a constant force present in our lives. The importance of ecosystems to the human mind can be traced back to the beginning of mankind with ancient civilizations drawing pictures of animals, plants, and weather patterns on cave walls. A cultural service is a non-material benefit that contributes to the development and cultural advancement of people, including how ecosystems play a role in local, national, and global cultures; the building of knowledge and the spreading of ideas; creativity born from interactions with nature (music, art, architecture); and recreation.
Supporting Services: The natural world provides so many services, sometimes we overlook the most fundamental. Ecosystems themselves couldn't be sustained without the consistency of underlying natural processes, such as photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, the creation of soils, and the water cycle. These processes allow the Earth to sustain basic life forms, let alone whole ecosystems and people. Without supporting services, provisional, regulating, and cultural services wouldn't exist.
Services under the threat of humans
Ecosystem services are the set of ecosystem functions that are useful to humans. These services make the planet inhabitable by supplying and purifying the air we breathe and the water we drink. However, may of these services are being impacted by human activities.
Disruptions of biogeochemical cycles can lead to floods, droughts, climate change, pollution, acid rain, and many other environmental problems. Soils provide critical ecosystem services, especially for sustaining ecosystems and growing food crops, but soil erosion and degradation are serious problems worldwide. Increasing habitat loss, climate change, settlement of wild areas, and wildlife consumption facilitate the transition of diseases of animals to humans, and other ecosystem alterations are increasing the prevalence of other diseases.
Human activities are causing loss of wildlife and biodiversity. Higher biodiversity usually increases ecosystem efficiency and productivity, stabilizes overall ecosystem functioning, thus, a decline in diversity makes ecosystems less resistant to disturbances. Decline in wildlife also reduces the services provided by organisms such a pollination, seed dispersal, and natural pest control. Thousands of species that are the components of ecosystems harbor unique chemicals and pharmaceuticals that can save people’s lives, but traditional knowledge of medicinal plants is disappearing and many potentially valuable species are threatened with extinction.
Hank gives the rundown on the top five ways humans are negatively impacting the environment and having detrimental effects on the valuable ecosystem services which a healthy biosphere provides.