Free Essay About Ecosystem Services

The conditions and processes by which the natural ecosystems and the species make them up, fulfill and sustain the life of a human form the ecosystem services. They do maintain biodiversity and ecosystem good production like natural fiber, biomass fuels, natural fiber, and forage timber, several industrial products, pharmaceuticals, together with their precursors. The provisional services are products derived from the ecosystem itself. First provisional services are the fiber and food. They include a range of food products obtained from animals, microbes, plants, materials like silk, hemp, jute, and wood.
Fuel includes dung, wood, and several other biological materials that serve as sources of energy. Fresh water is an example that links regulating and provisional services. Genetic resources involve genetic information and the genes used for biotechnology, plant and animal breeding. The ornamental resources entail the animal products such shells and skins. Flowers are used as ornaments though the resource value is determined culturally. It is an example that links provisional and cultural services. (Reid 40).
Regulating services are the benefits derived ecosystem process regulation. Cultural regulation is one of the regulating services. The ecosystem influences climate both globally and locally. For instance, basing on the local scale, land cover changes are capable of affecting both precipitation and temperature. At a global scale, the ecosystems do play a significant role in climate through either emitting or confiscating greenhouse gases.
Water regulation involves the magnitude and timing of flooding, runoff, and aquifer recharge in which the land cover changes can strongly influence it. Particularly includes the alterations that can change the system storage potential like the wetlands conversion or forests replacement with cropland or the croplands with urban areas. An ecosystem can be a source of impurities in fresh-water but at the same time can filter out and lead to a decomposition of organic wastes induced into the marine, coastal, and water ecosystems. Ecosystem changes can change the human pathogens like cholera directly and also revamp disease vectors abundance. (Dickinson, Gordon, and Murphy 80).
Cultural goods and services are the non-material benefits in which humans derive from the ecosystem by reflection, aesthetic experiences, recreation, cognitive development and spiritual enrichment. Cultural services become tightly bound to the human behavior and values together with their patterns of political, economic and social organization. Ecosystems diversity is a factor that influences cultural diversity.
Several religions tend to attach religious and spiritual values to ecosystems. These ecosystems influence the knowledge system types developed by various cultures. They affect types of social relations established in specific cultures. For instance, fishing societies vary when it comes to kind of agricultural societies and nomadic herding. (Hassan 25).
The climate is an essential environmental effect on the ecosystems. Its changes and impact greatly change the normal way of the ecosystems. An example is warming. It can force a kind of species to migrate to elevations or latitudes that are high. The high level entails temperatures that are a bit more conducive to their survival.
As the sea level rises, similarly, the intrusion of saltwater into a system of freshwater can force some prime species to die maybe or relocate. It removes the prey or predator critically in the existing food chain. A change in the climate not only directly influences the ecosystems and species, but also interacts with other stressors of humans like development. Some stressors though cause only minimal impacts when it acts alone. Their cumulative impact often leads to a kind of dramatic ecological changes. (Dickinson, Gordon, and Murphy 130).
Ecosystems services often contribute to the economic growth, health, jobs and human well-being. Even though we interact with ecosystems and its services on a daily basis, there links to the changes in climate can be indefinable since they affect several additional entangled factors. Its perturbations, climate change driven, impact human directly. It entails the reduction in water supply and quality, the iconic species loss, and landscapes, nature’s distorted rhythms, together with the potential of extreme events to engulf the ecosystems regulating services. Given that the ecosystems are well-documented, the challenge is how it is hard to quantify the vulnerability of humans which results from shifts in the process and services of the ecosystem. (Reid 84).
The biodiversity significance to the welfare of humans is quite humongous. The loss of biodiversity negatively influences human’s access to clean water, reliable food, raw materials and, therefore, likely to have greater impact on people who are poor and vulnerable. Human health is affected by environmental conditions to a greater extent. With this effect, maintaining the natural biodiversity, specifically functional biodiversity is fundamental to sustain processes of the ecosystem, functions and a continuous ecosystem service delivery within which the survival of humans and their welfare will depend upon. The specific functional biodiversity here is the range functional traits individual species or group of species demonstrate.
Affecting the temporal, magnitude and pace continuity through which materials and energy get circulated by the ecosystems, biodiversity an extensive sense influences ecosystem service provision. Ecosystems stressed by different factors can have ecosystem services impaired or reduced, with a consequent potential for a negative impact on well-being and health of humans. A focus on being successful in preserving the prime ecosystem components, principally natural biodiversity, with the responsibility to deliver services to humans should lead to a promising long-term ecosystems health with a continuous services delivery critically for other species’ survival as well. (Hassan 165).

Works Cited

Dickinson, Gordon, and K. J. Murphy. Ecosystems. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Hassan, Rashid M. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Current State and Trends, Volume 1 : Findings of the Condition and Trends Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Washington, DC: Island, 2005. Print.
Reid, Walter V. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis; a Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Washington, DC : Island, 2005. Print.