The links between biodiversity and ecosystem services

This chapter examines key concepts that are relevant to understanding the links between biodiversity and ecosystem services. It explains the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as the complexities arising from such linkages. The chapter provides an in-depth description of the links between biodiversity and several critical services, provided through different mechanisms and at different scales. The well-being of society depends to a large extent on the benefits derived from the functions and processes that take place within ecosystems. Biodiversity plays an important role in the delivery of many of these benefits. Biodiversity broadly encompasses the number, abundances, functional variety, spatial distribution, and interactions of genotypes, species, populations, communities, and ecosystems. A critical issue in ecosystem service assessments is the scant knowledge on how ecosystem services and their components are produced and maintained, how they are affected by system changes, such as land use change, and how they depend on different levels of biodiversity.

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