Biodiversity & Function

From an anthropological perspective, many view ecosystems as productive units that produce goods and services. Some of the most common goods produced by ecosystems are wood by forest ecosystems and grass for livestock by natural grasslands. Wild animal meat, often called bushmeat in Africa, has proven highly successful under well-controlled management schemes in South Africa and Kenya. There has been little success in the discovery and commercialization of substances from wild organisms for pharmaceutical purposes. The services derived from ecosystems are called ecosystem services. These may include (1) facilitating the enjoyment of nature, which can generate many forms of income and employment in the tourism sector, often referred to as ecotourism, (2) conserving water. , thereby facilitating more uniform distribution of water and (3) soil

conservation, open-air laboratories for scientific research, etc. greater degree of species or biological diversity – popularly referred to as biodiversity – of an ecosystem may contribute to greater resilience of an ecosystem, because there are more species present at a location to respond to change and thus ‘absorb’ or reduce its effects. This reduces the effect before the ecosystem’s structure is fundamentally changed to a different state. This is not universally the case and there is no proven relationship between the species diversity of an ecosystem and its ability to provide goods and services on a sustainable level. Humid tropical forests produce very few goods and direct services and are extremely vulnerable to change, while many temperate forests readily grow back to their previous state of development within a lifetime after felling or a forest fire. Some grassland has been sustainably exploited for thousands of years.