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Studying coral health in St. Thomas. Ecosystem health is a metaphor used to describe the condition of an ecosystem. [1] [2] Ecosystem condition can vary as a result of fire, flooding, drought, extinctions, invasive species, climate change, mining, fishing, farming or logging, chemical spills, and a host of other reasons.
Health ecology (also known as eco-health) is an emerging field that studies the impact of ecosystems on human health. It examines alterations in the biological , physical , social , and economic environments to understand how these changes affect mental and physical human health.
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.
For example, in amphibians, phthalates and BPA disrupt thyroid function, affecting larval development. Mollusks, crustaceans, and amphibians are generally more sensitive to these chemicals than fish, though disrupted spermatogenesis has been observed in fish at low concentrations.
In industrialized Western society, ecosystems have been managed primarily to maximize yields of a particular natural resource. [5] This method for managing ecosystems can be seen in the U.S. Forest Service's shift away from sustaining ecosystem health and toward maximizing timber production to support residential development following World War ...
Healthy ecosystems provide important ecosystem services that can contribute to climate change adaptation. For example, healthy mangrove ecosystems provide protection from the impacts of climate change, often for some of the world's most vulnerable people, by absorbing wave energy and storm surges, adapting to rising sea levels, and stabilizing shorelines from erosion.
The systemic origins of ecosystem-based management are rooted in the ecosystem management policy applied to the Great Lakes of North America in the late 1970s. The legislation created, the "Great Lakes Basin and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978", was based on the claim that "no park is an island", with the purpose to show how strict protection of the area is not the best method ...
Ecological health is a term that has been used in relation to both human health and the condition of the environment. In medicine, ecological health has been used to refer to multiple chemical sensitivity, which results from exposure to synthetic chemicals (pesticides, smoke, etc.) in the environment, hence the term ecological. [1]