ENG Chapter 1 - Biodiversity Skills

Understanding biodiversity and ecosystem servicesHow to plan for NatureAction planning skills in practiceMillenium Ecosystem Assessment (http://www.maweb.org)The link between biodiversity and ecosystemservicesChanges in biodiversity affect the ability of ecosystems to supply services and to recover from disturbances.When a species is lost from a particular location (even if it does not become extinct globally)or introduced to a new location, the various ecosystem services associated with that speciesare changed. More generally, when a habitat is converted, an array of ecosystem services associatedwith the species present in that location is changed, often with direct and immediate impactson human activity.Changes in biodiversity also have numerous indirect impacts on ecosystem services over longertime periods, including influencing the capacity of ecosystems to adjust to changing environments(medium certainty), causing disproportionately large and sometimes irreversible changes in ecosystemprocesses, influencing the potential for infectious disease transmission, and, in agriculturalsystems, influencing the risk of crop failure in a variable environment and altering the potentialimpacts of pests and pathogens (medium to high certainty).24