What Is Biodiversity?

What is Biodiversity?

Biodiversity, or biological diversity, refers to the variety of life at many different levels, from genes to species, populations to ecosystems. The earth sustains millions of different species, many of which have not yet been discovered. According to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, which was adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro as an important component of sustainable development, it includes the genetic differences within species, the variety between populations of species, the variety of ecosystems, and the goods and services that this diversity provides.

The ecosystems that support life on our planet provide us with a number of services, ranging from food, shelter, and medicine to intrinsic benefits from the enjoyment of nature.Without a diverse natural world that has the space and time to adapt to change, we will lose the ability of the earth to provide the ecosystem services that we take for granted.Every organism in an ecosystem plays a role in the ecosystem where it exists, and causing the extinction of an organism often has unforeseen consequences.Ecosystems provide natural filtration for our water and air, rejuvenate our soils through microbial fertilization, and sustain organisms that are critical to our well-being and survival, such as bees, which pollinate the majority of our agricultural products.According to a group of prominent ecological economists, the value of the earth’s ecosystem services is $33 trillion annually, which we receive for free (Costanza, 1998).However, when ecosystem services are disrupted and can no longer function normally, we begin to feel the economic as well as health effects.

New York State has numerous regions that are rich in biodiversity, or “significant natural communities”. The state designates these communities by determining the rarity of a community throughout its global range, as well as its rarity in New York State. These ranks are based on the range of the community, the number of occurrences, the viability of the occurrences, and the vulnerability of the community around the globe or across the state.The New York Natural Heritage program monitors 174 natural community types, 727 rare plant species, and 432 rare animal species. The graph at left, provided by the Heritage program, includes all 2,863 vascular plants, natural communities, and vertebrate animals native to New York, but does not include invertebrates, for which there are insufficient data. The graph shows how all of the species native to New York are doing, and while just over half are secure, about 37% are threatened in some way: imperiled (known to exist at 6-20 locations in NY state), critically imperiled (known to exist at 5 or fewer locations in the state), historical (no occurrences reported within the last 15 years), or presumed extirpated (all known occurrences are gone and there is little chance of finding new populations).

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment suggests that of the approximately 2 million known species, more than 90% are likely to be invertebrates. According to the IUCN Red List, which categorizes all threatened and endangered species worldwide, closer to 95% of the known species are invertebrates, but less than 1% of these species have been evaluated to determine if they’re threatened.