section_path: Role and benefits of biodiversity/Ecosystem services
section_name: Ecosystem services
paragraph_text: Ecosystem services
  
  There have been many claims about biodiversity's effect on the ecosystem services, especially provisioning and regulating services. Some of those claims have been validated, some are incorrect and some lack enough evidence to draw definitive conclusions.
  
  Ecosystem services have been grouped in three types:
  
  Experiments with controlled environments have shown that humans cannot easily build ecosystems to support human needs; for example insect pollination cannot be mimicked, though there have been attempts to create artificial pollinators using unmanned aerial vehicles. The economic activity of pollination alone represented between $2.1–14.6 billion in 2003. Other sources have reported somewhat conflicting results and in 1997 Robert Costanza and his colleagues reported the estimated global value of ecosystem services (not captured in traditional markets) at an average of $33 trillion annually.