Why Is Biodiversity Important? Who cares?

1. Why Is Biodiversity Important? Who cares?

2. What is Biodiversity? • The biological diversity and variety of life on Earth. • For example: species of plants, animals, and microorganisms; and the different ecosystems such as deserts, rainforests and coral reefs.

3. Why is Biodiversity Important? • Biodiversity boosts ecosystem productivity. • It gives beauty to our planet. • All species in an ecosystem play an important role in it. • For example: A larger number of plant species means a greater variety of crops. A greater variety of species ensures natural sustainability for all life forms. Healthy ecosystems can better withstand and recover from a variety of disasters.

4. A healthy biodiversity offers many natural services • Ecosystem services: • Protection of water resources • Soil formation and protection • Nutrient storage and recycling • Pollution breakdown and absorption • Climate stability • Maintenance of ecosystems • Recovery from disasters • Social benefits: • Research, education and monitoring • Tourism • Cultural values

5. Biological resources: • Food • Medical resources • Wood products • Ornamental plants • Breeding stocks and population reservoirs • Future resources • Diversity in genes, species and ecosystems • Genetic diversity helps prevent the chance of extinction in the wild. Species need a variety of genes to ensure successful survival because if not the chances of extinction increase. • Ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest are rich in diversity. Deforestation threatens many species such as the giant leaf frog.

6. Species depend on each other • There is “survival of the fittest” in the wild. • Cooperation between species is needed for survival. (Each species depends on the services provided by other species to survive.) • This type of cooperation is often what a “balanced ecosystem” refers to.

7. Soil, bacteria, plants: the Nitrogen Cycle • Industrial-farming techniques alter the nitrogen cycle due to pesticides and other chemicals that kill natural fertilizers such as worms.

8. Bees: Crucial agricultural workers • Bees play a crucial role in human food. They are  the primary species that fertilize food-producing plants. • 1/3 of the human food come from the plants bees pollinate. • The bee population has decreased due to environmental degradation, diseases, pollution, and farming pesticides.

9. Interdependent marine ecosystem • By destroying the marine ecosystems and slaughtering animals that live in there, the marine food chain becomes altered. • For example: by slaughtering whales, killer whales have to eat seals instead of baby whales. The seal population declines. As it declines, the killer whales target the otter population. As otters declined, the targets of otters (such as urchins) flourished… and so on.

10. Interdependency vs. human intervention • Nature can be recovered, often without the need for human interventions. • For example: a population of elephants in a reserve in Africa grew to such point that the food supply ran out. These affected other species. People from the reserve gathered the population together to try to keep the ecosystem balanced. • They decided to leave one park alone while keeping the other park with the elephants culled. A few years later, the park where things were left alone had naturally regenerated, allowing the vegetation to grow back.

11. Biodiversity providing lessons for scientists in engineering • Engineers have been researching to learn how various species work, produce, and consume resources. • For example: spiders can produce their silk with a higher tensile strength than many alloys of steel. So biologists are looking at these processes in more depth to see if they can reproduce or enhance such capabilities.

12. More important than human use or biological interest • Earth has been recognized as a mass of living organisms that have to be taken care of. • Ecological balance is crucial for Earth, not only for humans.

13. Putting an economic value on biodiversity • Biodiversity needs to have a price for people to see the importance of it. • The Economic of Ecosystems and Biodiversity is an organization that attempts to compile, build and make a compelling economics case for the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity. • Biodiversity is fundamental to economics. • For example: the G8 nations together with 5 major emerging economies (China, India, South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico) use almost three quarters of the Earth’s biocapacity.

14. About 40% of world trade is based on biological products or processes. • Examples: • By reducing the amount of meat industry, it helps protects forest from deforestation because a vast territory is needed to make cattle ranches. • To be able to make paper, trees need to be cut. By increasing the paper’s price, people will buy less paper and therefore less trees will need to be cut. • Half of the American economy is constituted of wasted labor, wealth and resources.