Biodiversity

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UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) definition of biodiversity

“‘Biological diversity’ means the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.”

Aspects Included

  • Functional diversity
    • different types of diversity all play a key role for holding/maintaining key ecosystem functions in the face of large-scale environmental and climate change. Ecologists refer to this as functional redundancy, and it is one of the core means of ensuring the resilience of the ecosystems on which humans depend.
  • Response Diversity
    • Variation in responses of species performing the same function
    • Crucial for resilience
  • Genetic diversity
  • Species richness
  • Biotic interactions

Drivers of Loss

According to IPBES (in order of signifcance)

  1. Land/sea use change
  2. Direct exploitation
  3. Climate change
  4. Pollution
  5. Invasive alien species

Features

Subject to tipping points such as:

  • clear lakes can become turbid and dominated by algal blooms
  • coral reefs become overgrown by macroalgae
  • fisheries collapse owing to overexploitation
  • tropical forests shift to savannah-type ecosystems under high fire intensity

Value of Biodiversity

This functional value of biodiversity is often poorly understood and hugely undervalued.190,191 Biodiversity enhances ecosystem services necessary for human wellbeing, including food production, pollination, pest control, heat regulation, carbon sinks, and moisture feedback for rainfall. Nutritional quality, protective attributes, and flavours of most plant foods is a function of evolutionary interactions between species

From Paper - Food in the Anthropocene the EAT–Lancet Commission

Biodiversity plays significant roles in buffering shocks and extreme events, and in regime shift dynamics

From Paper - Our Future in the Anthropocene - Folke 2021

Provides Ecosystem Services

Biodiversity underpins many public goods such as clean air, pollination, recreation, and stress relief

Digital Garden

Here are all the notes in this garden, along with their links, visualized as a graph.