The report focussed on the impact of biodiversity on employment and the value of biodiversity … When discussing the importance of preserving biodiversity, we can’t avoid mentioning its anthropocentric value. There are many measures of biodiversity; species richness (the number of species in a given area) represents a single but important metric that is valuable as the common currency of the diversity of life—but it must be integrated with other metrics to fully capture biodiversity. Biodiversity influences climate at local, regional, and global scales, thus changes in land use and land cover that affect biodiversity can affect climate. Fishing and seafood industries, for example, are largely dependent on natural … Defining why it matters is a way of highlighting the benefits of the natural world. Such phase shifts have been documented in Jamaica, elsewhere in the Caribbean, and in Indo-Pacific reefs (C19, S3.3.1). The trigger for such phase shifts usually includes increased nutrient inputs leading to eutrophic conditions and removal of herbivorous fishes that maintain the balance between corals and algae. With reduced diversity in the gene pool, the chance for extinction increases. Although areas of high species richness (such as biodiversity hot spots) are more susceptible to invasion than species-poor areas, within a given habitat the preservation of its natural species pool appears to increase its resistance to invasions by non-native species. 1.3 What is the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services? Thus conserving or restoring the composition of biological communities, rather than simply maximizing species numbers, is critical to maintaining ecosystem services (C11.2.1, C11.3). … TEV denotes the sum total of all kinds of values attached to biodiversity minus the primary value. Loss of ecosystem functions, and the services derived from them, however, occurs long before global extinction. These can be used to provide first-order approximations of both expected functional diversity as well as possible changes in the distribution of these associations should environmental conditions change. Changes in biotic interactions among species—predation, parasitism, competition, and facilitation—can lead to disproportionately large, irreversible, and often negative alterations of ecosystem processes. Biodiversity is defined as “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.” The importance of this definition is that it draws attention to the many dimensions of biodiversity. Ecosystem functioning, and hence ecosystem services, at any given moment in time is strongly influenced by the ecological characteristics of the most abundant species, not by the number of species. The ocean, through its sheer volume and links to the terrestrial biosphere, plays a huge role in cycling of almost every material involved in biotic processes. Chapters 3 and 4 discussed a wide array of services and amenities that biodiversity provides for people who might or might not value its individual components—individual genes, species, and ecosystems—and the diversity of components. Biodiversity can also serve as a safety-net to vulnerable households during times of crisis, provide income opportunity to the rural poor and sustain productive agricultural ecosystems. Some marine microbes can degrade toxic hydrocarbons, such as those in an oil spill, into carbon and water, using a process that requires oxygen. Find out why in The Economics of Biodiversity. Biodiversity affects carbon sequestration primarily through its effects on species characteristics, which determine how much carbon is taken up from the atmosphere (assimilation) and how much is released into it (decomposition, combustion). This air is replaced by cooler moister air that flows laterally from adjacent patches (advection). The importance of agricultural biodiversity encompasses socio-cultural, economic and environmental elements. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Biodiversity Synthesis. Protecting the Catskill watersheds that provide drinking water for New York City is one case where safeguarding ecosystem services paid a dividend of several billion dollars. This project is no longer funded and will not be updated. Ecological, economic and social values of biodiversity are all vital to economic growth, job creation and technical development. The preservation of the number, types, and relative abundance of resident species can enhance invasion resistance in a wide range of natural and semi-natural ecosystems (medium certainty). Increasing associated biodiversity with low-diversity agroecosystems, however, can enhance biological control and reduce the dependency and costs associated with biocides. The major importance of marine biodiversity in climate regulation appears to be via its effect on biogeochemical cycling and carbon sequestration. Shifts to different regimes may cause rapid substantial changes in biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being. The efficiency of this trophic transfer and therefore the extent of carbon sequestration is sensitive to the species richness and composition of the plankton community (C11.4.3). Coping mechanisms … The loss of multiple components of biodiversity, especially functional and ecosystem diversity at the landscape level, will lead to lowered ecosystem stability (high certainty). In ecosystem of low biodiversity, the uptake of nutrient is not so efficient. Some environmental indicators, such as global mean temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, are becoming widely accepted as measures of anthropogenic effects on global climate. Estimates of the global annual monetary value of pollination vary widely, but they are in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars (C11.3.2, Box C11.2). Biodiversity forms the foundation of the vast array of ecosystem services that critically contribute to human well-being. (See Figure 1.1) This results in significant gaps in knowledge, especially regarding the status of tropical systems, marine and freshwater biota, plants, invertebrates, microorganisms, and subterranean biota. Biodiversity loss is a systemic risk. More-complete biotic inventories are badly needed to correct for this deficiency (C4). In natural ecosystems, the effects of abiotic and land use drivers on ecosystem services are usually more important than changes in species richness. The maintenance of natural pest control services, which benefits food security, rural household incomes, and national incomes of many countries, is strongly dependent on biodiversity. Region-to-region differences in ecosystem processes are driven mostly by climate, resource availability, disturbance, and other extrinsic factors and not by differences in species richness (high certainty). It is the number of different species of plants, animals, and microorganisms. In spite of many tools and data sources, biodiversity remains difficult to quantify precisely. What is Biodiversity? Biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem functions that provide supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. Some marine organisms provide the ecosystem service of filtering water and reducing effects of eutrophication. But precise answers are seldom needed to devise an effective understanding of where biodiversity is, how it is changing over space and time, the drivers responsible for such change, the consequences of such change for ecosystem services and human well-being, and the response options available. It follows that large-scale human influences over this biota have tremendous impacts on human well-being. The dramatic effects of climate change and variability (such as El Niño oscillations) on coral reefs are medi­ated by the disruption of this symbiosis (C11.4.2). Climate Change Effects on the World's Biodiversity, The Loss of Biodiversity from Human Activity. But as humans put increasing pressure on the planet, using and consuming more resources … It explicitly recognizes that every biota can be characterized by its taxonomic, ecological, and genetic diversity and that the way these dimensions of diversity vary over space and time is a key feature of biodiversity.

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