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An example of an ecosystem service is pollination, here by a honey bee on avocado crop. Ecosystem services are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These ecosystems, when functioning well, offer such things as provision of food, natural pollination of crops, clean air and water, decomposition of wastes, or flood ...
The report identified four major categories of ecosystem services: provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. [46] It concludes that human activity is having a significant and escalating impact on the biodiversity of the world ecosystems, reducing both their resilience and biocapacity. The report refers to natural systems as ...
Ecological goods and services (EG&S) are the economical benefits (goods and services) arising from the ecological functions of ecosystems. Such benefits accrue to all living organisms, including animals and plants, rather than to humans alone. However, there is a growing recognition of the importance to society that ecological goods and ...
Indirect use value – results from the provision of support or protection to other activities that produce benefits, such as through the provision of regulating and supporting ecosystem services (e.g. cycling of soil nutrients, seed dispersal, fire control).
Ecosystem services are ecologically mediated functional processes essential to sustaining healthy human societies. [6] Water provision and filtration, production of biomass in forestry, agriculture, and fisheries, and removal of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the atmosphere are examples of ecosystem services essential to public health and economic opportunity.
Ecosystems, for example, contain abiotic resources and interacting life forms (i.e., individual organisms that aggregate into populations which aggregate into distinct ecological communities). Because ecosystems are dynamic and do not necessarily follow a linear successional route, changes might occur quickly or slowly over thousands of years ...
The emerging concept of ecosystem services (coined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005) changed the way ecologists perceived so-called "ordinary species" : as abundant species represent the bulk of biomass and biological processes, even if they don't appear directly threatened their conservation constitutes as a major concern for ...
Ecosystem services have been grouped in three types: [142] Provisioning services which involve the production of renewable resources (e.g.: food, wood, fresh water) Regulating services which are those that lessen environmental change (e.g.: climate regulation, pest/disease control)