General description
This course is considered as the basic for this Master degree, and it tackles the ecosystems in an innovative approach. It, primarily, define the concept of services, and provides detailed descriptions of the typology of the services provided by different ecosystems from provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services to human being. Finally, the course consolidates the knowledge about the interlinkages between different services and human being activities to conserve it and ensure its sustainability.
The course contains seven chapters:
1- Definition of Ecosystem Services: This chapter defines the concept of ecosystem services and its social, economic, human and natural interlinkages, development of the environmental thinking that leads to the concept of ecosystem services.
2- Provisioning services: This chapter describes services that provide natural resources to human being such as fresh water, food, forest, rivers, lakes, coastal and marine resources.
3- Regulating services: This chapter describes the role of regulating services in regulating the climate and materials cycles and control of flood and erosion and protection from diseases.
4- Cultural services: This chapter describes cultural and human heritages as touristic services, mental services and life maintaining services.
5- Supporting services: This chapter describes services that support the provisions of other services such as maintaining of biodiversity, food chain and primary production.
6- Interaction between services: This chapter explains the relationships between services through examples that are presented for discussion between students and the teacher about the relationships and interactions between different services.
7- Interaction between services and human well- being: Explains the relationship between services and human life and the mutual influence between them within the framework of intellectual, social, economic, natural life of human being.