We want to leave a legacy of wildlife conservation to future generations because of the value wildlife holds in representing the history, culture, and soul of the United States.
Although the intangible ways the natural world improves our lives are immeasurable, there are many practical advantages to residing in a world where ecosystems are robust and flourishing.
Wildlife and natural ecosystems have benefited society in many ways, including increased economic growth, a wider variety of food options, and discoveries in the medical field.
The concept of ecosystem services has emerged in recent years to describe how nature benefits humans.
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Any time wildlife and ecosystems help humans, that’s an ecosystem service. One can reap small or large, immediate or delayed rewards.
Ecosystem Services
Countless species have made their home on Earth. No single organism does not rely on another for nutrients, oxygen, or some other vital function.
Because of the interdependence of living things, we refer to the resulting interacting system as an ecosystem. Interactions between organisms in an ecosystem are crucial to establishing parameters for that ecosystem.
Humans gain a great deal from an ecosystem’s biotic and abiotic parts. Ecosystem services refer to the sum of all these advantages. These services are crucial to maintaining Earth’s life and biodiversity.
Four Types of Ecosystem Services
The UN-backed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) classified ecosystem services into four broad categories: provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting.
Provisioning Services
People usually think of food as the first service provided by nature.
Foods like fruit and vegetables, trees, fish, and livestock are all available to us because they are byproducts of natural ecosystems.
What we call “provisioning services” encompass all of how the natural world can be used to improve people’s lives.
Drinking water, timber, wood fuel, natural gas, oils, plants that can be made into clothes and other materials, and medicinal benefits are all provisioning services.
Regulating Services
Ecosystems are essential because they supply many necessities that allow us to live.
Trees prevent soil erosion, plants purify the air and water, bacteria break down garbage, bees spread pollen, and plants clean the air and filter the water. Ecosystems are clean, sustainable, functional, and change-resistant because of all these processes.
Ecosystem services are beneficial because they mitigate the adverse effects of environmental factors.
Pollination, decomposition, water purification, erosion and flood control, carbon storage, and climate regulation are all regulatory services.
Cultural Services
The natural world has changed us as we interact with and shape it. It has been an ever-present force in our lives, directing our progress in knowledge and understanding and our interactions with others.
As early as prehistoric cave paintings depicting animals, plants, and even weather patterns, we can see the profound impact ecosystems have had on the human psyche.
The role of ecosystems in local, national, and global cultures; knowledge and idea building; creativity sparked by interactions with nature (music, art, architecture); and recreational opportunities are all examples of cultural services.
Supporting Services
Due to the abundance of benefits we receive from nature, we often overlook the most fundamental ones.
Natural processes like photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, soil formation, and the water cycle are essential to the health of entire ecosystems.
These mechanisms keep the planet habitable for all life, from the simplest bacteria to complex ecosystems and human societies. Provisional, regulatory, and cultural services would not be possible without the services they rely on.
History of concepts and methods
The term “ecosystem services” first emerged in the 1970s and has since gained prominence.
The concept that natural systems benefit human well-being, however, goes back much further in time.
As early as 400 BCE, Plato recorded the connections between deforestation and water scarcity. As early as the 18th and 19th centuries, economists understood the importance of land and other natural resources as economic drivers.
Human Nature, by George Perkins One of the first works, to formally characterize relationships between natural and social systems, Marsh is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the American conservation movement.
Marsh contended that severe disruption of biological systems brought about by human activities would reduce the standard of living for all people.
The methods used by natural scientists for characterizing the structure and function of biological systems have their roots in centuries of research.
The modern ecological concepts, models, and methods developed during and after the 20th century are particularly relevant to ecosystem services analysis.
The value of ecosystem services can be quantified with the help of formal economic methods for nonmarket valuation, pioneered in the 1940s by environmental and resource economists and has undergone extensive refinement since then.
By the turn of the 21st century, analyses of ecosystem services had begun to focus more on questions like whether or not the value of various services can and should be quantified in monetary terms, how changes in these relationships affect human welfare and the best methods for doing so.
