Marine biodiversity loss, largely through overfishing, is increasingly impairing the capacity of the world’s oceans to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations (Worm et al. 2006). Yet marine fisheries provide employment and income for 0.2 billion people around the world, and fishing is the mainstay of the economy of many coastal regions; 41 million people worked ...
All extractive systems in which the over harvested resource is one or more biological populations, can lead to pervasive trophic cascades and other unintended ecosystem-level consequences to non-target species. Most hunting, fishing, and collecting activities affect not only the primary target species, but also species that are taken accidentally or opportunistically. Furthermore, exploitation often causes physical damage to the ...
Ecosystems and their constituent species provide an endless stream of products, functions, and services that keep our world running and make our existence possible. To many, even the thought of putting a price tag on services like photosynthesis, purification of water, and pollination of food crops may seem like hubris, as these are truly priceless services without which not ...
While many people know about how plants prevent erosion, protect water supplies, and “clean the air”, how bees pollinate plants or how owls reduce rodent activity, many lesser-known organisms not only have crucial ecological roles, but also produce unique chemicals and pharmaceuticals that can literally save people’s lives. Thousands of plant species are used medically by traditional, indigenous communities ...
“Mobile links” are animal species that provide critical ecosystem services and increase ecosystem resilience by connecting habitats and ecosystems as they move between them (Gilbert 1980; Lundberg and Moberg 2003;). Mobile links are crucial for maintaining ecosystem function, memory, and resilience (Nystrm and Folke 2001). The three main types of mobile links: genetic, process, and resource links (Lundberg and ...
One of the most vital and immediate services of ecosystems, particularly of forests, rivers and wetlands, is the provisioning and regulation of water resources. These services provide a vast range of benefits from spiritual to life-saving, illustrated by the classification of hydrologic services into five broad categories by Brauman et al. (2007): improvement of extractive water supply, improvement of ...
Without forest cover, erosion rates skyrocket, and many countries, especially in the tropics, lose astounding amounts of soil to erosion. Worldwide, 11 million km2 of land (the area of USA and Mexico combined) are affected by high rates of erosion (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005b). Every year about 75 billion tons of soil are thought to be eroded from terrestrial ...
Marine biodiversity loss, largely through overfishing, is increasingly impairing the capacity of the world’s oceans to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations (Worm et al. 2006). Yet marine fisheries provide employment and income for 0.2 billion people around the world, and fishing is the mainstay of the economy of many coastal regions; 41 million people worked ...
Without forest cover, erosion rates skyrocket, and many countries, especially in the tropics, lose astounding amounts of soil to erosion. Worldwide, 11 million km2 of land (the area of USA and Mexico combined) are affected by high rates of erosion (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005b). Every year about 75 billion tons of soil are thought to be eroded from terrestrial ...
All extractive systems in which the over harvested resource is one or more biological populations, can lead to pervasive trophic cascades and other unintended ecosystem-level consequences to non-target species. Most hunting, fishing, and collecting activities affect not only the primary target species, but also species that are taken accidentally or opportunistically. Furthermore, exploitation often causes physical damage to the ...
The role of biodiversity in providing ecosystem services is actively debated in ecology. The diversity of functional groups (groups of ecologically equivalent species (Naeem and Li 1997)), is as important as species diversity, if not more so (Kremen 2005), and in most services a few dominant species seem to play the major role (Hooper et al. 2005). However, many ...
Timber extraction in tropical forests is widely variable in terms of species selectivity, but even highly selective logging can trigger major ecological changes in the understory light environment, forest microclimate, and dynamics of plant regeneration. Even reduced-impact logging (RIL) operations can generate enough forest disturbance, through elevated canopy gap fracture, to greatly augment forest understory desiccation, dry fuel loads, ...
Although the direct impacts of defaunation driven by overhunting can be predicted to some degree, higher-order indirect effects on community structure remain poorly understood since Redford’s (1992) seminal paper and may have profound, long-term consequences for the persistence of other taxa, and the structure, productivity and resilience of terrestrial ecosystems (Cunningham et al. 2009). Severe population declines or extirpation ...
Although the direct impacts of defaunation driven by overhunting can be predicted to some degree, higher-order indirect effects on community structure remain poorly understood since Redford’s (1992) seminal paper and may have profound, long-term consequences for the persistence of other taxa, and the structure, productivity and resilience of terrestrial ecosystems (Cunningham et al. 2009). Severe population declines or extirpation ...
Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are biological resources other than timber which are extracted from either natural or managed forests (Peters 1994). Examples of exploited plant products include fruits, nuts, oil seeds, latex, resins, gums, medicinal plants, spices, dyes, ornamental plants, and raw materials such as firewood, Desmoncus climbing palms, bamboo and rattan. The socio-economic importance of NTFP harvest to ...
Humans have been hunting wildlife in tropical forests for over 100 000 years, but the extent of consumption has greatly increased over the last few decades. Tropical forest species are hunted for local consumption or sales in distant markets as food, trophies, medicines and pets. Exploitation of wild meat by forest dwellers has increased due to changes in hunting ...
Tropical deforestation is driven primarily by frontier expansion of subsistence agriculture and large development programs involving resettlement, agriculture, and infrastructure. However, animal and plant population declines are typically pre-empted by hunting and logging activity well before the coup de grâce of deforestation is delivered. It is estimated that between 5 and 7 million hectares of tropical forests are logged ...
Our rapacious appetite for both renewable and non - renewable resources has grown exponentially from our humble beginnings—when early humans exerted an ecological footprint no larger than that of other large omnivorous mammals— to currently one of the main driving forces in reorganizing the structure of many ecosystems. Humans have subsisted on wild plants and animals since the earliest ...
In an increasingly human-dominated world, where most of us seem oblivious to the liquidation of Earth’s natural resource capital, exploitation of biological populations has become one of the most important threats to the persistence of global biodiversity. Many regional economies, if not entire civilizations, have been built on free-for-all extractive industries, and history is littered with examples of boom ...
Interactions between species, such as predation, competition, parasitism, and an array of mutualisms, have a profound influence on the structure of communities. The loss of a species or a change in its abundance, particularly for species that interact with many others, can have a marked effect on ecological processes throughout fragmentedlandscapes. Changes to predator-prey relationships, for example, have been ...
