In terms of life, social exchange, sense of community, competitiveness, service, abundance, variety, sheer energy, it makes you realise what we have lost, what our spineless acquiescence to the culture of the supermarket and the retail chain have cost us.
Some biodiversity metrics clearly reflect ecosystem services (e.g., abundance and diversity of harvestable species), whereas others may reflect indirect and difficult to quantify relationships to services (e.g., relevance of species diversity to ecosystem resilience, cultural value of native species).
Species level traits were found to benefit a number of ecosystem services, with species abundance being particularly important for pest regulation, pollination and recreation, and species richness for timber production and freshwater fishing.
In this four-year field experiment, conducted on six field parcels, the ability of wildflower strips to simultaneously promote the availability of pollination services (using bumblebee abundance as a proxy), species diversity (total species richness of bumblebees, butterflies and diurnal moths) and conservation (abundance of habitat specialist butterflies) was evaluated.
Although introduced birds provide some seed dispersal services, the relative abundance and proportion of seeds they disperse differs from native species, as does their habitat use, which could have implications for seed germination and seedling survival.
(Hint: an abundance of services and company help).
Below, an excerpt from "The Executive Computer; a Web of Networks, an Abundance of Services," by John Markoff, published in The Times on Feb. 28, 1993.
It is intended to offer to more than 200,000 apartment-dwellers in some 65,000 of the city's co-ops and condominiums one-stop access to an abundance of services that range from building maintenance to grocery deliveries.
Yet relative to other places, the state has historically been a pretty good bargain, with a low-cost, enviable higher education system, subsidized energy and an abundance of services for those down on their luck.
The ecosystem services contributing to high abundance, diversity, rarity, and risk were identified for management in these focal areas.
We used an exclusion experiment to test the effects of field- and landscape-scale habitat complexity on avian-provisioned pest-control services and assessed avian abundance and diversity across 32 conventional alfalfa (Medicago sativa) fields in winter and early spring in California.
