Facts about Biodiversity
Species evenness is a measure of biodiversity that quantifies how equal the populations are numerically.
The biodiversity of flora, fauna, and ecosystems that characterize an ecoregion tend to be distinct from that of other ecoregions.
Biodiversity is beginning to receive a juridical setting, defined by the following laws.
The idea of static conservation of biodiversity is disappearing and being replaced by the idea of dynamic conservation, through the notion of resource and innovation.
Biodiversity is generally highest in the tropics, lowest in the subtropical latitudes (desert regions) and the poles (tundra, high latitude deserts).
The history of biodiversity during the Phanerozoic (the last 540 million years), starts with rapid growth during the Cambrian explosion—a period during which nearly every phylum of multicellular organisms first appeared.
Despite this, there is a trend toward lower biodiversity as a result of human action, as monoculture is promoted in agriculture, habitats are replaced through commercial and residential use, and species become increasingly extinct.
Uniform approval for use of biodiversity as a legal standard has not been achieved, however.
Biodiversity is also an important aspect of the study of ecoregions, a relatively large area of land or water that contains a geographically distinct assemblage of natural communities.
Species richness is the simplest measure of biodiversity and is simply a count of the number of different species in a given area.
France and Rigg reviewed biodiversity research literature in 1998 and found that a there was a significant lack of papers studying marine ecosystems, leading them to dub marine biodiversity research the "sleeping hydra."
Biodiversity found on earth today is the culmination of 4 billion years of life on earth.
Biodiversity is a neologism (recently created word, term, or phrase), literally meaning biological and diversity.
Some scientists, such as E. O. Wilson, hold that the gene is the fundamental unit of natural selection and thus of evolution, and therefore the real biodiversity is genetic diversity.
Biodiversity is a broad concept, so a variety of objective measures have been created in order to empirically measure and define biodiversity.
Other issues affecting biodiversity include pollution by human activity and climate change driven by human activity.
The word biodiversity itself was coined by W. G. Rosen in 1985 while planning the 1986 National Forum on Biological Diversity, organized by the National Research Council (NRC).
During the last century, erosion of biodiversity has been increasingly observed.
Not only species overuse and ecosystem degradation, but also conversion to very standardized ecosystems (e.g., monoculture following deforestation) are factors affecting biodiversity.
Biodiversity offers many benefits: ecological, economic, scientific, and moral.
Biodiversity is also viewed as a measure of the relative diversity among organisms present in different ecosystems.
Just like a species with high genetic diversity, an ecosystem with high biodiversity may have a greater chance of adapting to environmental change.
First coined at a 1986 conference and subsequently used in 1988 in the book BioDiversity, edited by E. O. Wilson, the term has grown in popularity and is used widely in science and conservation policy.
The new agreements commit countries to conserve biodiversity, develop resources for sustainability, and share the benefits resulting from their use.
One important part of biodiversity is “crop diversity,” which is also called agrobiodiversity.
The level of biodiversity is a good indicator of the state of our relationships with other living species.
Estimation of the value of biodiversity is a necessary precondition to any discussion on the distribution of biodiversity richness.
One of the challenges society faces is quantifying biodiversity and understanding how best to create regulations and a moral climate that both support maintaining biodiversity and human development.
The word biodiversity was deemed more effective in terms of communication than biological diversity.
Under these new rules, it is expected that bioprospecting or collection of natural products has to be allowed by the biodiversity-rich country, in exchange for a share of the benefits.
Biodiversity is usually plotted as taxonomic richness of a geographic area over a temporal scale.
Biodiversity must be evaluated, through observations, inventories, and so forth, if political decisions are to take it into account.
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the diversity of life, ranging from the level of genes to species.
One definition of a biodiversity hotspot is a region with many endemic species, or species exclusively native to a place or biota.
Scientifically, biodiversity is important because each species can give scientists some clue as to how life evolved and will continue to evolve on earth.
Biodiversity has contributed in many ways to the development of human culture, and, in turn, human communities have played a major role in shaping the diversity of nature at the genetic, species, and ecological levels.
Most people see biodiversity as a reservoir of resources to be drawn upon for the manufacture of food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic products.