Humans rely on nature extensively for everything from food production to coastal protection, but those contributions might be more threatened than previously thought, according to new findings from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Humans rely on nature extensively for everything from food production to coastal protection, but those contributions might be more threatened than previously thought, according to new findings from the University of Colorado Boulder.
This research, out today in Nature Communications, looked at three different coastal food webs that include those services provided to humans, or ecosystem services, and found that even if the services themselves aren’t directly threatened, they can become threatened when other species around them go extinct—often called secondary extinctions.
With human-induced threats to biodiversity and ecosystems, such as climate change and degradation, on the rise, these findings could have ripple effects not just on our management of the ecosystems themselves, but on conservation science, policy and funding broadly.
“These extinctions can cascade, impacting services, so protecting certain species that are disproportionately contributing to services either by supporting them or directly providing them can potentially help mitigate any indirect threats,” said Aislyn Keyes, a PhD student in ecology and evolutionary biology at CU Boulder and the lead author on the paper.
Read more at: University of Colorado at Boulder
