Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: NPCC offers new online portal to information about native plants and ecosystem services.
March 31, 2019
The Native Plant Conservation Campaign is has created a new online resource to provide information about the ecosystem services supplied by native plant communities to human societies and economies. Our goal is to provide tools to help individuals and organizations more easily and effectively demonstrate the importance (including but not limited to economic value) of native plant conservation.
Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from native plant communities and the ecosystems these communities sustain. They include- stable supplies of food, fiber and clean water
- flood, erosion, pest and disease control
- buffering of local weather and global climate
- soil productivity and fertility
- habitat for pollinators, birds and other wildlife
- heath, spiritual and recreational benefits.
These and other ecosystem services maintain the conditions for human and all other life on Earth. The annual global economic value of ecosystem services has been estimated to be at least $145 trillion.
Ecosystem services are useful in promoting native plant restoration and conservation. Many elected officials, media representatives and others may not understand or value native plant communities, but may value the economic and other benefits that ecosystem services supply to communities.
The importance of ecosystem services is becoming increasingly well accepted and understood. On March 1, the United Nations declared a Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. They set a goal of restoration of 350 million hectares of degraded land between now and 2030 to generate $9 trillion in ecosystem services and take an additional 13-26 gigatons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
Locally adapted native plants are the most stable and productive suppliers of ecosystem services. Local natives coevolved with local soils, geology, microclimate, water regime, pollinators and other wildlife. Their collective species and genetic diversity, accumulated over millenia of evolution, make them uniquely well equipped to suvive and function in the face of climate change, invasive species, and other threats.
These new webpages offer information on various categories of ecosystem services and the mechanisms by which native plant communities deliver them. We provide links to government and intergovernmental assessments and conservation plans for these services, key scientific articles, as well as graphics and other educational and outreach materials.
We have broken ecosystem services into nine groups, each with its own page and links.
We hope that you will include ecosystem services in your conservation advocacy to convince decisionmakers, the media and the public to Save Plants to Save the Planet and Save Ourselves
Over the next few weeks, NPCC News will offer previews of the Ecosystem Services tools. We hope you find them useful!
