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Coral reefs are dying around the world. [147] Human activities have substantial impact on coral reefs, contributing to their worldwide decline. [148] Damaging activities encompass coral mining, pollution (both organic and non-organic), overfishing, blast fishing, as well as the excavation of canals and access points to islands and bays.
Human ecology has a history of focusing attention on humans' impact on the biotic world. [1] [34] Paul Sears was an early proponent of applying human ecology, addressing topics aimed at the population explosion of humanity, global resource limits, pollution, and published a comprehensive account on human ecology as a discipline in 1954. He saw ...
Human activities affect marine life and marine habitats through overfishing, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species, ocean pollution, ocean acidification and ocean warming. These impact marine ecosystems and food webs and may result in consequences as yet unrecognised for the biodiversity and continuation of marine life forms. [3]
The European settlement period serves as a poignant example of how human activities can drastically impact natural ecosystems. In more recent times, overexploitation has resulted in the gradual emergence of the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development , which has built on other concepts, such as sustainable yield , [ 11 ] eco ...
Only 10–20% of the world's drylands, which include temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands, scrub, and deciduous forests, have been somewhat degraded. [11] But included in that 10–20% of land is the approximately 9 million square kilometers of seasonally dry-lands that humans have converted to deserts through the process of ...
Human activities dominate the global and most regional N cycles. [36] N inputs have shown negative consequences for both nutrient cycling and native species diversity in terrestrial and aquatic systems. In fact, due to long-term impacts on food webs, Nr inputs are widely considered the most critical pollution problem in marine systems. [8]
The diversity of species and genes in ecological communities affects the functioning of these communities. These ecological effects of biodiversity in turn are affected by both climate change through enhanced greenhouse gases, aerosols and loss of land cover [citation needed], and biological diversity, causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and extinctions of species and local populations.
An understanding of the role of humans as components of the ecosystems and the use of adaptive management is also important. [10] While ecosystem management can be used as part of a plan for wilderness conservation, it can also be used in intensively managed ecosystems (e.g., agroecosystems and close to nature forestry). [10]