APES 2.2 Ecosystem Services

Enduring Understanding:

Learning Objective:

Essential Knowledge:

There are four categories of ecosystem services: provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting.
Anthropogenic activities can disrupt ecosystem services, potentially resulting in economic and ecological consequences.

Ecosystem services are the processes by which natural environments provide life-supporting resources.
There are four categories of ecosystem services:

Provisioning Services:

Provisions are goods that humans can use directly, such as lumber, food crops, medicinal plants, natural rubber, furs, etc.
Due to provisions normally having market value, their monetary value is fairly easy to quantify.

Regulating Services:

Natural ecosystems help to regulate environmental conditions. For example, humans may add 8+ gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere on an annual basis, but only 4 gigatons of carbon may remain there. The rest is removed by natural ecosystems such as tropical rainforests and oceans.
Ecosystems provide a means of regulating nutrient cycles and hydrologic cycles as well.

Cultural Services:

Ecosystems provide cultural and aesthetic benefits to human populations, and people are willing to pay monetary values to utilize these ecosystems.
Intellectual gain through the awarding of grants to pursue knowledge also fits in this category. The value of these cultural services may be more of an instrumental value as opposed to a defined or quantified monetary value.

Supporting Services:

Natural services provide numerous support services that would be extremely costly for humans to generate. For example, consider the pollination of food crop plants, and the role bees, insects, hummingbirds, and bats play in the pollination process resulting in multi-billion dollar increases in food production.
In addition to providing habitats for animals that pollinate plants, ecosystems provide a natural pest control service as they serve as a habitat for predators that prey on agricultural pests.
Healthy ecosystems may filter pathogens and chemicals from water. We must consider our fresh water sources and how much time and money is involved in water filtration for human populations. The cleaner the source of water, the more efficient the treatment process as well as overall costs.
Supporting services are the foundation that everything is built upon. Ecosystems could not survive without functioning supporting services.

Environmental indicators are an established indicator that describes the current state of an environmental system.
Some common environmental indicators include: human population, ecological footprint, total food production, carbon dioxide, average global surface temperature, sea level change, annual precipitation, species diversity, water quality, extinction rate, habitat loss rate, life expectancy, etc.
The environmental indicators helps scientists analyze the “health” of the planet. The goal is sustainability. Sustainability is the notion of living on Earth in a way that allows humans to use its resources without depriving future generations of those resources.

Anthropogenic activities can disrupt ecosystem services, potentially resulting in economic and ecological consequences.
Anthropogenic activities are considered human derived activities. For example, the increase of carbon dioxide over the last two centuries is considered anthropogenic. The two major sources of anthropogenic carbon dioxide are the combustion of fossil fuels and the net loss of forests and other habitats that would otherwise take up and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
There are many other examples of anthropogenic activities that may disrupt ecosystem services, such as surface and subsurface extraction or addition, land use change, hydrological change, explosions, fire, recreation and tourism, fisheries, power generation, oil and gas exploration, agriculture, aquaculture, overfishing, etc.