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Unit 2 Ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are the goods and services provided by ecosystems that maintain and improve
human well-being.

Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystems, grassland ecosystems and
aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems functioning properly provides such things like agricultural
produce, timber, and aquatic organisms such as fishes and collectively, these benefits are becoming
known as 'ecosystem services', and are often integral to the provisioning of clean drinking water, the
decomposition of wastes, and the natural pollination of crops and other plants.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was carried out between 2001 and 2005 to assess the
consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the scientific basis for actions
needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to
human well-being .The program was launched by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June
2001

MA has divided ecosystem services into four main categories: provisioning, regulating, cultural, and
supporting.

Provisioning Services: These are the products obtained from ecosystems, including:

 Food and fiber. This includes the vast range of food products derive from plants, animals, and
microbes, as well as materials such as wood, jute, hemp, silk, and many other products derived
from ecosystems.
 Fuel. Wood, dung, and other biological materials serve as sources of energy.
 Genetic resources. This includes the genes and genetic information used for animal and plant
breeding and biotechnology.
 Biochemicals, natural medicines, and pharmaceuticals. Many medicines, biocides, food additives
such as alginates, and biological materials are derived from ecosystems.
 Ornamental resources. Animal products, such as skins and shells, and flowers are used as
ornaments, although the value of these resources is often culturally determined.

Regulating Services: These are the benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes,
including:

 Air quality maintenance. Ecosystems both contribute chemicals to and extract chemicals from
the atmosphere, influencing many aspects of air quality.
 Climate regulation. Ecosystems influence climate both locally and globally. For example, at a
local scale, changes in land cover can affect both temperature and precipitation. At the global
scale, ecosystems play an important role in climate by either sequestering or emitting
greenhouse gases.
 Water regulation. The timing and magnitude of runoff, flooding, and aquifer recharge can be
strongly influenced by changes in land cover, including, in particular, alterations that change the
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water storage potential of the system, such as the conversion of wetlands or the replacement of
forests with croplands or croplands with urban areas.
 Erosion control. Vegetative cover plays an important role in soil retention and the prevention of
landslides.
 Water purification and waste treatment. Ecosystems can be a source of impurities in fresh water
but also can help to filter out and decompose organic wastes introduced into inland waters and
coastal and marine ecosystems.
 Regulation of human diseases. Changes in ecosystems can directly change the abundance of
human pathogens, such as cholera, and can alter the abundance of disease vectors, such as
mosquitoes.
 Biological control. Ecosystem changes affect the prevalence of crop and livestock pests and
diseases.
 Storm protection. The presence of coastal ecosystems such as mangroves and coral reefs can
dramatically reduce the damage caused by hurricanes or large waves.

Cultural Services: These are the nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems through spiritual
enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences, including:

 Cultural diversity. The diversity of ecosystems is one factor influencing the diversity of cultures.
 Spiritual and religious values. Many religions attach spiritual and religious values to ecosystems
or their components.
 Educational values. Ecosystems and their components and processes provide the basis for both
formal and informal education in many societies in school trips.
 Inspiration. Ecosystems provide a rich source of inspiration for art, folklore, national symbols,
architecture, and advertising.
 Aesthetic values. Many people find beauty or aesthetic value in various aspects of ecosystems,
as reflected in the support for parks, “scenic drives,” and the selection of housing locations.
 Cultural heritage values. Many societies place high value on the maintenance of either
historically important landscapes (“cultural landscapes”) or culturally significant species.
 Recreation and ecotourism. People often choose where to spend their leisure time based in part
on the characteristics of the natural or cultivated landscapes in a particular area.

Supporting Services: Those services that are necessary for the production of all other ecosystem
services. They differ from provisioning, regulating, and cultural services in that their impacts on people
are either indirect or occur over a very long time, whereas changes in the other categories have relatively
direct and short-term impacts on people. Services, like nutrient cycling, primary production, soil
formation, habitat provision and pollination. For example, humans do not directly use soil formation
services, although changes in this would indirectly affect people through the impact on the provisioning
service of food production, production of oxygen gas (through photosynthesis) is categorized as a
supporting service since any impacts on the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere would only
occur over an extremely long time. Some other examples of supporting services are primary production,
production of atmospheric oxygen, soil formation and retention, nutrient cycling, water cycling, and
provisioning of habitat.
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Ecosystem restoration
Ecosystem Restoration is the “process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded,
damaged or destroyed”. Restoration ecology is about bringing back the structural and functional
diversity of the degraded ecosystem to its original state.

Why Eco-restoration?

Ecological restoration is usually carried out for one of the following reasons:

 To restore highly disturbed, but localized sites, such as abandoned mines. Restoration
often envolves improvement of the physical and chemical characteristics of soil and
ensuring the return of vegetation cover.
 To improve productivity of degraded lands. Degradation of productive land is increasing
worldwide, leading to reduced agricultural and forest production. Restoration in these
cases aim to return the system to a sustainable level of productivity, e.g., by reversing soil
erosion or salinization problems in agricultural or rangelands.
 To enhance nature conservation values in protected landscapes. Conserved lands are
being reduced in value worldwide by various forms of human-induced disturbance,
including the effects of introduced stock, invasive species (plant, animal, and
pathogen), pollution, and fragmentation. In these cases, restoration aims to reverse the
impacts of these degrading forces, e.g., by removing an introduced herbivore from a
protected landscape.
 To restore ecological processes over broad landscape-scale or regional areas. In addition to
the need for restoration efforts within conservation lands, there is also a need to ensure that
human activities in the broader landscape do not adversely affect ecosystem processes.
There is an increasing recognition that protected areas alone will not conserve
biodiversity in the long term, and that production and protection lands are interlinked by
landscape-scale processes and flows (e.g., hydrology, movement of biota)

Why Is Ecological restoration Necessary/ What Is purpose of Ecological restoration? (Discuss about 4
types of ecosystem services)

Importance of Ecosystems: An ecosystem is comprised of plants, animals and microbes and the air,
water, soils and other components upon which they depend, all linked together through nutrient cycles
and energy flows. In recent years, ecologists have developed the concept of ecosystem services to
highlight their importance. Ecosystem services include the many benefits (services or goods) derived
from well-functioning ecosystems, including food, fiber, regulation of climate stability, pest mitigation,
recreation, and educational and inspirational opportunities. Ecological restoration can increase
ecosystem services such as habitat protection, regulation of clean water, carbon storage and
maintenance of soil fertility. Helping threatened or endangered species
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Planning
1. The restoration process begins with an assessment of the degraded site.
2. The current site conditions should be thoroughly examined to identify the need for restoration
and any potential actions required to restore the site.
3. Restorationists should consider the causes of degradation, whether degradation can be
reversed or lessened, and the ways in which restoration can be accomplished.
4. Support and participation from local communities and government institutions is of great help.
5. Preventing further loss of protected populations or habitat is a common motivator of
restoration. Other goals may include erosion control, rangeland forage production, protection of
wildlife habitat, and preservation of cultural landscapes. Planning for climate change has
become increasingly important.

Implementation
1. In some cases, restoration specialists simply need to remove the source of the disturbance and
allow sites to recover naturally through ecological succession. This process is called passive
restoration because restoration specialists do not need to take much action. For example,
halting agricultural tillage or stemming the overuse of riverbanks by livestock may be enough to
bring a site back to a pre-disturbed state.
2. In other cases, the ecosystem has passed a threshold of degradation, and disturbed sites within
it are not able to recover on their own or can only recover very slowly. This is particularly
common when soil and water resources have been compromised through erosion, earth-moving
activities, or some other major disturbance. To restore such highly disturbed sites, the removal
of the disturbance is only the first step. Restorationists must then engage in active restoration,
which starts or accelerates the recovery process or attempts to change the site’s ecological
succession.
3. One component of active restoration is soil rehabilitation and land stabilization. This
component includes the restoration of the soil’s or water’s original chemical, biological, and
physical characteristics. Examples include applying amendments (such as lime) to improve soil
pH, stemming the flow of fertilizers to artificially enriched soil or water, inoculating soils with
beneficial microorganisms, and tilling to improve aeration and root penetration. Erosion control
and land stabilization tools include physical structures along stream banks, blankets of mulch
placed on hillsides, and plantings to stabilize slopes.
4. Another component of active restoration is restoring the plant community. After the site is
prepared, restorationists generally select seeds, seedlings, or cuttings for revegetation.
Ecological principles related to the assembly of the biological community help explain the long-
term consequences of how and when different species are added to a site.
5. When selecting seeds and propagules, restorationists generally try to find the species and
cultivars that will be most suitable for local conditions as well as for the site’s intended uses
(such as habitat for native wildlife, land stabilization, or livestock forage). Local plants and
animals are likely to be well adapted to the target ecosystem. At the same time, many
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restoration projects attempt to maximize the genetic diversity of the site by collecting seeds or
propagules from a large number of source individuals (see biodiversity). Increased genetic
diversity gives restored plant populations a greater ability to survive disturbance events and
other ecosystem changes. Such genetic concerns can also be important for animals, which are
sometimes transported or reintroduced to an area. Nitrogen fixing free living bacteria and
bacteria for nodulation in legumes shrubs and trees are also introduced to increase nitrogen
content of soil so that other plat species can also utilize the resource and establish themselves.
6. Some restored sites are relatively small and isolated, which can lead to problems associated
with fragmented habitats. Populations in smaller and more-isolated habitat patches experience
a greater risk of inbreeding, local extinction of species, and negative edge effects (that is, the
effects of one habitat on an adjacent habitat). Many restoration projects try to mitigate
fragmentation-related problems by increasing the size of the habitat patch, bolstering genetic
diversity, and fostering ecological linkages between patches. Restoration may also reestablish
historical disturbance patterns, such as those involving flooding or fire.
7. Monitoring and documentation are essential in the restoration process. Regular monitoring
guides adaptive management and also determines when and if restoration goals are being met.
In some cases only limited human intervention (followed by appropriate management) may be
necessary, while in other cases human intervention may be necessary for decades.
8. Bioremediation: refers to the process of using microorganisms to remove the environmental
pollutants or prevent pollution. Bioremediation uses no toxic chemicals. Microorganisms like
Bacteria and Fungi are the main role player when it comes to executing the process of
Bioremediation. Bacteria are the most crucial microbes in this process as they break down the
waste into nutrients and organic matter. Even though this is an efficient process of waste
management but bioremediation cannot destroy 100% contaminants. Bacteria can easily digest
contaminants like chlorinated pesticides or clean oil spills but microorganisms fail to destroy
heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Bioremediation technologies can be generally classified as
in situ or ex situ. In situ bioremediation involves treating the contaminated material at the site
while ex situ involves the removal of the contaminated material to be treated elsewhere.
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