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An example for water purification as an ecosystem service is as follows: In New York City, where the quality of drinking water had fallen below standards required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), authorities opted to restore the polluted Catskill Watershed that had previously provided the city with the ecosystem service of ...
The ecosystem services provided by intact reefs, seagrasses, and mangroves are both highly valuable and mutually enhance each other. Coastal protection (storm/wave attenuation) maintains the structure of adjacent ecosystems, and associated ecosystem services, in an offshore-to-onshore direction.
This indirectly benefits society via the maintenance of ecosystem services and the reduction of severe wildfires. Ecosystem management is an approach to natural resource management that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability and persistence of an ecosystem's function and services while meeting socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs.
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.
Marine ecosystems are important sources of ecosystem services and food and jobs for significant portions of the global population. Human uses of marine ecosystems and pollution in marine ecosystems are significantly threats to the stability of these ecosystems.
Ecologically distinct species, on the other hand, have a much larger effect. Similarly, dominant species have a large effect on ecosystem function, while rare species tend to have a small effect. Keystone species tend to have an effect on ecosystem function that is disproportionate to their abundance in an ecosystem. [11]: 324
Ecologists are teaming up with economists to measure and express values of the wealth of ecosystems as a way of finding solutions to the biodiversity crisis. [15] [16] [17] Some researchers have attempted to place a dollar figure on ecosystem services such as the value that the Canadian boreal forest's contribution to global ecosystem services ...
Natural habitats can provide Ecosystem services to humans, which are "any positive benefit that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people." [10] The natural environment is a source for a wide range of resources that can be exploited for economic profit, for example timber is harvested from forests and clean water is obtained from natural streams.