Aquatic ecosystem services: an overview of the Special Issue

Abstract

The dependency of human wellbeing from ecological systems has been long recognized. At the same time, ecosystems’ integrity and their capacity to sustain human wellbeing have been threatened (Vörösmarty et al., 2010; Steffen et al., 2015; Culhane et al., 2019). One way of raising public awareness about ecosystems’ value and the need for their protection is to recognize and value the services they provide to society (Bull et al., 2016); an approach that is not without criticism (Bekessy et al., 2018)...