How does depletion of forests affect the ecosystem?
“For terrestrial ecosystems, the most important direct drivers of change in ecosystem services in the past 50 years, in the aggregate, have been land cover change (in particular, conversion to cropland) and the application of new technologies (which have contributed significantly to the increased supply of services such as food, timber, and fiber) (CWG, S7.2.5, SG8.ES). In 9 of the 14 terrestrial biomes examined in the MA, between one half and one fifth of the area has been transformed, largely to croplands (C4.ES). Only biomes relatively unsuited to crop plants, such as deserts, boreal forests, and tundra, have remained largely untransformed by human action. Both land cover changes and the management practices and technologies used on lands may cause major changes in ecosystem services. New technologies have resulted in significant increases in the supply of some ecosystem services, such as through increases in agricultural yield. In the case of cereals, for example, from the mid-1980
