Ecosystem services refer to the many and varied benefits that humans receive from the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. These benefits can be direct or indirect, small or large, and include the following categories:

• Provisioning Services: These are the benefits that humans can extract from nature, such as food, water, timber, and medicinal benefits.

• Regulating Services: These are the benefits that ecosystems provide to make life possible for humans, such as cleaning air and filtering water, decomposing wastes, pollinating flowers, and holding soil in place to prevent erosion.

• Supporting Services: These are the services that ecosystems provide to maintain the other three types of services, such as nutrient cycles, soil formation, and habitat provision for biodiversity.

• Cultural Services: These are the non-material benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems, such as spiritual and recreational benefits.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in the early 2000s popularized the concept of ecosystem services and grouped them into these four broad categories. The loss of ecosystem services is not just an environmental issue, but an economic and cultural one as well. Therefore, it is important to protect and sustainably manage biodiversity and ecosystems to ensure the provision of ecosystem services.