The Journal is published by the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic in cooperation with the Cave Administration of the Czech Republic, the Krkonoše Mts. National Park Administration, the Bohemian Forest Mts. National Park Administration, the Podyjí National Park Administration and the The Bohemian Switzerland National Park Administration. It has been published since 1946.
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Nature Conservation 5/2012 — 27. 2. 2013 — Research, Surveys and Data Management — Print article in pdf
Plesník J.: Ecosystem services are not anonymous. Importance of organisms for ecosystem functioning
Význam organismů pro fungování ekosystémů
Both biological diversity and ecosystem services (ES) have become a key concept in nature conservation and landscape protection. ES are provided by ecosystems which are per se a specific level of biodiversity.
Moreover, the role of species in ecosystem functioning (EF) has been sometimes overlooked. Nevertheless, species are a regulator of underpinning ecosystem processes; they are outcomes from ecosystems that directly lead to good(s) that are valued by people and a good that again is a subject to valuation, whether economic or otherwise. The precise nature of the relationship between biodiversity, EF and ES is rather complex and mainly since the mid-1990s the subject of active research and ongoing scientific debate. While research on biodiversity, most often expressed by species richness, and EF had developed a large body of experiments and mathematical theory describing how genetic, species and functional diversity of organisms control basic ecosystem processes and functions, studies on biodiversity and ES were, in contrast, most correlative, conducted at the landscape scale and often focused on how major habitat modifications influenced provisioning and regulating services provided by ecosystems. While the current knowledge suggests that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecological communities capture biologically essential resources, produce biomass, decompose and recycle biologically essential nutrients and that biodiversity increases the “stability” of ecosystem services through time, for many ES, the evidence for the effects of biodiversity is mixed, although biodiversity either directly influenced or is strongly correlated with certain provisioning and regulating services. Therefore, significant gaps both in science and policy need the attention if future ecosystems are to provide the range of services to support more people sustainably.