Does Biodiversity Matter? What is it and should Conservation be so Focused on it?
#biodiversity #conservation #wildlife #learning
If you have spent much time in the world of Conservation biology or even on this channel, you probably have heard the term biodiversity, the variety and variability of life in a particular area, habitat, or planet. The way biodiversity is most often measured in the field is through species richness, being the count of species in an area. Species Richness is often adjusted with species abundance which also takes in relative abundance of certain species. In nature some species are naturally abundant while others are rare, so it is actually quite important when measuring biodiversity to take this fact into account. The way biodiversity is measured can be more specifically broken down into alpha, beta, and gamma diversity. Alpha diversity is species richness at a local scale, within an individual site or habitat. Beta diversity is a ratio between the small scale local diversity and regional diversity. These two can then be added together to calculate gamma diversity, which is meant to be the total diversity in a given landscape. But should conservation biology be focused so much on biodiversity? Biodiversity's main benefits are often said to be it increases evolution rates and stabilizes ecosystems and those are the main reason to protect it. Often biodiversity as a word, is really trying to talk about all life on Earth both known and unknown, and protecting biodiversity is saying we want to save everything as the noble opportunistic goal of conservation; but unfortunately this is not all that realistic, we are losing species daily, and so cannot hope to save everything, especially since conservation has only a limited budget, so finding priorities is unfortunately necessary, but if biodiversity is standing for protecting everything, it is not a particularly useful term. Biodiversity is ultimately just a placeholder for some sort of biological value. Perhaps removing this blanket placeholder term and using specific biological values, like ecosystem functionality, we want to protect and making those a priority is a better approach than just saying save biodiversity.
Sources
"What is biodiversity?" (PDF). United Nations Environment Programme, World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
Mora, Camilo; Tittensor, Derek P.; Adl, Sina; Simpson, Alastair G. B.; Worm, Boris; Mace, Georgina M. (23 August 2011). "How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?". PLOS Biology. 9 (8): e1001127. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127. PMC 3160336. PMID 21886479.
Staff (2 May 2016). "Researchers find that Earth may be home to 1 trillion species". National Science Foundation. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
Whittaker RH (1960). "Vegetation of the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon and California". Ecological Monographs. 30 (3): 279–338. doi:10.2307/1943563. JSTOR 1943563.
Santana, C. (2014). Save the planet: eliminate biodiversity. Biology & Philosophy, 29(6), 761–780. doi: 10.1007/s10539-014-9426-2
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