SERVICES ENVIRONMENT • Refers to everything that surrounds a living organism, which includes physical factors such as air, water, soil, and biological factors such as living organisms, flora, and fauna. • It is a community of organisms interacting with each other and with the abiotic or nonliving components of the environment. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
• Refers to the direct and indirect
contributions of ecosystems to human survival and quality of life. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES • Support services include the cycling of vital nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus- minerals that are essential for survival and can only be derived in their usable forms through the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, respectively.
• Provisioning services provide the basic needs
for survival- air, water, shelter, food, and energy. The photosynthesis in plants, the water cycle, the food web, and the presence of different natural ecosystems, such as forests, rivers, and seas, provide these basic necessities. • Regulating services are benefits obtained by regulating the climate, hazards, and diseases through processes such as carbon sequestration- removal of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and storage in plants.
• Cultural services include nonmaterial benefits
such as spiritual enrichment, cultural heritage, recreation, tourism, and aesthetic experience that nature provides for humans. Ecosystems are able to provide these services when they are healthy and intact. These important life-giving and sustaining processes are the result of the dynamic interaction between the living and nonliving components of an ecosystem. Human activities, such as land use changes, introduction of invasive species, resource exploitation, and pollution, primarily affect the ecosystems. These activities also affect the biodiversity, as well as the quality of soil, water, and air. • Land use changes involve the conversion of natural ecosystem to urban, industrial, or agricultural areas. Example: mangrove reclaiming, leveling, and or converted into urban areas. • The introduction of invasive species, which pose a threat in an ecosystem may also drive native species, resulting to their endangerment or extinction. • The burning of the fossil fuels to generate electricity increases the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and is attributed to global warming. • Extensive and poorly-managed agricultural activities employed to provide food affect soil quality and create dead zones in bodies of water due to eutrophication caused by the discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers.
