Kangaroos form an integral part of our natural ecosystems, playing an important role in promoting regeneration of native plants and reducing the fuel load in forests and grasslands. Kangaroos and wallabies belong to the 'super-family' macropodidae (from the Greek word for 'large foot').

Lord Howe Island (is considered to be an outstanding example of an island ecosystem developed from submarine volcanic activity. The island’s isolation and its varied landscape of mountains, valleys, hills, lowlands and sea-cliffs have resulted in a diverse array of habitat types supporting many distinctive flora and fauna groups)

Off to work..................

Ecosystem management is an approach to ecosystem maintenance and restoration that aims to promote the long-term sustainability of ecosystem functioning and thus, meet socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs by ensuring the persistence of ecosystem services. Building upon traditional natural resource management approaches, ecosystem management, which integrates ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional priorities, is a holistic, adaptive method for evaluating and achieving ecosystem resilience and sustainability.

Natural Capital (is the world's stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms. Some natural capital assets provide people with free goods and services, often called ecosystem services. Two of these (clean water and fertile soil) underpin our economy and society, and thus make human life possible)

Eugene Pleasants Odum (September 17, 1913 – August 10, 2002) was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953). The Odum School of Ecology is named in his honor.

Planetary Boundaries (is a concept involving Earth system processes that contain environmental boundaries. It was proposed in 2009 by a group of Earth system and environmental scientists, led by Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen from the Australian National University. The group wanted to define a "safe operating space for humanity" for the international community, including governments at all levels, international organizations, civil society, the scientific community and the private sector, as a precondition for sustainable development. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change)

Calling it a night.............................

Qatar’s environmental impact remains worryingly high. The country’s per capita ecological footprint is now the second highest in the world, as another Gulf state, Kuwait, has overtaken it to become the worst offender of the 152 countries that were measured, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet Report 2014. The third country in the list is the UAE, with Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, in 33^rd position

Regulating Services (the benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes, including, for example, the regulation of climate, water, and some human diseases)

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Ernst-Detlef Schulze (born September 12, 1941) is a German plant ecologist who was executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jenauntil September 2009. Between 1997 and 2004 he was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board on Global Environmental Change of the German Federal Government. Together with Bernhard Ulrich from Göttingen, he founded the five ecosystem research centers in Germany and has been researching the global material cycles ever since. 

Termites, as ecosystem engineers, modulate the availability of resources for other species, such as soil macro- and microfauna and microorganisms, and create habitats that can be used by a remarkable number of organisms for nesting, roosting or accommodating stages of their life cycles