ABSTRACT
Largely taken for granted, our landscapes provide a variety of critical goods and services. Created by the interactions of living organisms with their environment, the suite of “ecosystem services” – purifying air and water, detoxifying and decomposing waste, renewing soil fertility, regulating climate, mitigating droughts and floods, controlling pests, and pollinating vegetation – quite literally provides necessary conditions for human society. One cannot begin to understand flood control, for example, without realizing the impact that widespread wetland destruction has had on the ecosystem service of water retention; nor can one understand water quality without recognizing how development in wetlands or forested watersheds has degraded the service of water purification.
