2.2 Ecosystem Services

What Are Ecosystem Services?

Ecosystem services are benefits that healthy ecosystems provide to humans, often for free. They include clean air and water, pollination, soil formation, flood control, and recreation. Biodiversity underlies these services — more diverse ecosystems tend to be more stable and productive, providing services more reliably over time.

Categories of Services

Ecosystem services fall into four types: provisioning (food, timber, water, medicine), regulating (climate control, flood/erosion control, water purification, pollination), supporting (nutrient cycling, soil formation, photosynthesis/primary production), and cultural (recreation, spiritual/aesthetic value, ecotourism). Supporting services underpin the other three categories.

Valuing and Losing Services

Ecosystem services are hard to price but have enormous economic value (e.g., wetlands filtering water saves treatment costs). Human activities like deforestation, pollution, and habitat destruction reduce biodiversity, degrading these services and increasing costs — for example, losing pollinators threatens food production and losing wetlands increases flood damage.

Key terms

Ecosystem services

Benefits that ecosystems provide to humans, such as clean water, air, pollination, and recreation.

Provisioning services

Tangible products obtained from ecosystems, e.g., food, timber, water, and medicine.

Regulating services

Services that control natural processes, e.g., climate regulation, flood control, water purification, pollination.

Supporting services

Fundamental processes that sustain other services, e.g., nutrient cycling, soil formation, primary production.

Cultural services

Non-material benefits like recreation, ecotourism, and spiritual or aesthetic value from nature.

Try an AP-style question

Bees pollinating crops is which type of ecosystem service?

1. Regulating
2. Provisioning
3. Cultural
4. Supporting