Ecosystem Services and Sustainability

What are Ecosystem Services?

♥ Most of us spend the bulk of our lives in human-made houses, office buildings, factories, cars, and other artificial environments that insulate us from raw nature.

• Control and moderate.
• Provide us with and renew air, water, and soil.
• Recycle vital nutrients through chemical cycling.
• Provide us with renewable and nonrenewable energy sources and nonrenewable minerals.
• Furnish us with food, fiber, medicines, timber, and paper.
• Pollinate crops and other plant species.
• Absorb, dilute, or detoxify many pollutants and toxic chemicals.
• Help control populations of pests and disease organisms.
• Slow soil erosion and help prevent flooding.
• Provide the biodiversity of genes and species needed to adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions through evolution and genetic engineering.

Why is Biodiversity such an important Ecosystem Service?

♥ The result of these changes is Biological Diversity or Biodiversity : the many forms of life the conditions currently found on earth.

• Genetic Diversity

• Species Diversity

• Ecological diversity

♥ Another term for diversity is wildness : the existence of wild gene pools, species, and ecosystems that are completely or mostly undistributed by human activities.

What are the two basic principles of Ecosystem Sustainability?

1. By using renewable solar energy as their energy source and...

2. By recycling reasonably efficiently the nutrients its organisms need for survival, growth, and reproduction .

Why is an understanding of Ecology essential for Environmental Studies?

♥ We have seen that the essential features of the living and nonliving parts of individual ecosystems, and of the ecosphere as a whole, are interdependence and connectedness. Without the services performed by diverse communities of species, we would be starving, gasping for breath and drowning in our own wastes.

“The problem of human future range far beyond ecology, yet ecology is an essential part of them.”

- Robert H. Whitaker

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Prepared by:

MELANIE BERNDETTE BORJA

BEED-SPED3C