Special Column:Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of IGSNRR, CAS

The impact of human activities on ecosystem services

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  • Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, CAS, Beijing 100080, China

Received date: 2002-05-12

  Revised date: 2002-09-11

  Online published: 2003-02-25

Abstract

Ecosystem services are the foundation of man's sustainable development.But when human take advantages of many kinds of ecosystem services in providing natural resources and living environment,they also affected ecosystem services intensively.Although a part of human activities are helpful to stabilize and improve ecosystem services,more of them result in a series of eco-environmental crises and disasters that endanger man's survival and development.The damage of ecosystem services due to anthropogenic effects and its consequence are increasingly becoming outstanding problems in the world.The impact of human activities on ecosystem ser-vices has received much attention of human society at present.It is urgent to make clear the de-gree and ecological mechanism that human activities impact ecosystem services.The patterns and mechanisms and changing trend of ecosystem services affected by human activities were ex-plored in this paper.The impacts of human activities on ecosystem services include negative effects and positive effects.The former weaken ecosystem services through changing habitat and changing ecosystem structure and changing biogeochemical cycle.The main patterns include land reclamation,ur-banization,industrialization,grazing,hunting,international trade,agriculture and so on.The lat-ter play a significant role in improving eco-environment condition.The study of these passive factors,such as ecosystem management,ecological engineering,ecological restoration and reha-bilitation,ecological planning and evaluation,is also undertaking in a more and more deep-going way and has become the hot spot of ecological research.Although many researchers have carried out substantial studies on the impact of human ac-tivities on ecosystem services,much work still need to be conducted in the formation mechanism of ecosystem services,the threshold of ecosystems in bearing the human interference and the simulation and predication of human impacting ecosystem services.These problems were posed in this paper.

Cite this article

ZHENG Hua, OUYANG Zhi-yun, ZHAO Tong-qian, LI Zhen-xin, XU Wei-hua . The impact of human activities on ecosystem services[J]. JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES, 2003 , 18(1) : 118 -126 . DOI: 10.11849/zrzyxb.2003.01.018

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