Marine Biodiversity And Ecological Services
Healthy Marine Ecosystems Provide Benefits On A Variety Of Scales
Mar 3, 2009
Healthy marine ecosystems provide humans with many important commodities, the most obvious and important being food. Finfish and shellfish, for example, are humanity's greatest source of animal protein, especially in developing nations. Other foodstuffs include various marine plants.
Unfortunately, the services provided by the ecological systems underlying commercial fisheries, for example, are themselves all too often taken for granted – or worse yet, not noticed at all.
Examples of Ecological Services
Common examples of marine ecological services, organized by scale, include:
Local Scale
- Mangroves and coral reefs protecting coastlines from wave action
- Mangrove roots or sea grass beds providing critical habitats for juvenile fish
Regional Scale
- The detoxification and sequestration of pollutants by geochemical processes in seawater
- Decomposition of dead marine plants and animals and cycling of nutrients for reuse by other organisms in the ecosystem
Global Scale
- Partial climate regulation via biogeochemical cycling in ocean systems, such as marine phytoplankton uptake of atmospheric CO2
Goods, Ecological Services, and the Market
Because such services are largely outside current economic systems, changes in their quantity are not always obvious - unlike goods, such as fish, which increase in market value when scarce.
Yet it is the combination – both goods and services together, in healthy, biodiverse ecosystems – which ultimately provide life support for all life on Earth. If these systems are modified or damaged in the course of extracting goods, the services they provide may change. Research has shown that diverse marine ecosystems provide valuable services resiliently even during times of change, whereas weakened, impoverished ecosystems break down and their services fail.
Ecosystem Service Studies
It is only recently that ecosystem services have gained recognition as important benefits in and of themselves. As such, the study of ecosystem services is in its infancy. Areas of suggested research focus include:
- Finding methods to quantify services
- Determining the scales over which services are produced
- Clarifying the effects that alterations in biodiversity have, in terms of ecological systems and their functioning services
Specific knowledge about many critical ecosystem services is currently lacking. What is known, however, is that most appear irreplaceable, and are inextricably bound to ecosystem health and diversity. This in itself is a strong signal as to the importance of preserving the ecosystems themselves.
References
Roberts, C.M. et al. 2003. Ecological Criteria For Evaluating Candidate Sites For Marine Reserves. Ecological Applications 13(1) Supplement.
Southwood, T.R.E. 2003. The Story Of Life. Oxford University Press, Inc. New York.
Worm, Boris et al. 2006. Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services. Science, vol. 314, 3 Nov 2006
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