water plays a vital and essential role in our ecosystem. this natural resource is becoming scarce, making its availability a major social and economic concern. use of a large variety of synthetic dyes in textile industries has raised an hazardous environmental alert. about 17 - 20% of freshwater pollution is caused by textile effluents. these effluents are recalcitrant to biodegradation and cau...

The natural world generates a range of valuable goods and services that support human well–being. !ese goods and services, collectively called ecosystem services, are typically provided free of charge and often have characteristics of public goods. Like other public goods, ecosystem services will not be provided optimally by aggregating the decisions of individuals motivated by self–interest. F...

The concept of ecosystem health is a way to assess the holistic operations and development potential of urban ecosystems. Accelerated by the practical need for integrated ecosystem management, assessment of urban ecosystem health has been greatly developed and extensively applied in urban planning and management. Development is aimed at comprehensively evaluating the performance of urban ecosys...

BACKGROUND Vaccination is a complex ecosystem with several components that interact with one another and with the environment. Today's vaccine ecosystem is defined by the pursuit of polio eradication, the drive to get as many of the new vaccines to as many people as possible and the research and development against immunologically challenging diseases. Despite these successes, vaccine ecosystem...

Article history: Received 10 May 2007 Received in revised form 20 September 2008 Accepted 23 September 2008 Available online 28 October 2008 The concept of ecosystems services has become an important model for linking the functioning of ecosystems to human welfare. Understanding this link is critical for a widerange of decision-making contexts.While there have been several attempts to come upwi...

Despite the fact that scientific and political consideration for ecosystem services has dramatically increased over the past decade, few studies have focused on marine and coastal ecosystem services for conservation strategies. We used an ecosystem services approach to assess spatial distributions of habitat risks and four ecosystem services (coastal protection, carbon storage, recreation, and ...

Evidence is accumulating that the continued provision of essential ecosystem services is vulnerable to land-use change. Yet, we lack a strong scientific basis for this vulnerability as the processes that drive ecosystem-service delivery often remain unclear. In this paper, we use plant traits to assess ecosystem-service sensitivity to land-use change in subalpine grasslands. We use a trait-base...

Ecosystem-based management is logistically and politically challenging because ecosystems are inherently complex and management decisions affect a multitude of groups. Coastal ecosystems, which lie at the interface between marine and terrestrial ecosystems and provide an array of ecosystem services to different groups, aptly illustrate these challenges. Successful ecosystem-based management of ...

Changes in land use can cause significant changes in the ecosystem structure and process variation of ecosystem services. This study presents a detailed spatial, quantitative assessment of the variation in the value of ecosystem services based on land use change in national nature reserves of the Ningxia autonomous region in China. We used areas of land use types calculated from the remote sens...

Rivers are complex systems that involve various interacting hydrological, geo-morphological and ecological processes resulting in the provisioning of riverine ecosystem services. The latter are flows of goods and services from ecosystems to society, such as food, timber and drinking water. Quantification of ecosystem services can support environmental impact assessments or scenario analyses for...