Ecosystems provide a range of goods and services vital to the well-being of humans and other living things, as well as to the development of society. Along with natural resources, tangible and tradable in the market, they provide a series of intangible, non-marketable services that translate...

Understanding that the environment is more than the resource base of human economic activities was a watershed in the awareness of the real value of the environment and the need for an assessment of its quality. The complex of benefits from ecosystems that people obtain in the literature became...