Biodiversity includes several aspects
Hans-Joachim Schneider/Alamy
At first glance, the idea of biodiversity seems very simple. It is essentially the diversity of all life on Earth. But understanding biodiversity and halting or reversing its decline is no easy task.
“People often use the word biodiversity to mean any characteristic of living things that we want to protect,” he says. mark velend, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. “I think this is a useless definition in science, because if it's all there is, then it's nothing.”
For biodiversity to be a valuable concept, he says, it needs to be a measure of biological diversity. In doing so, we can assess not only where we are and where we are heading, but also how best to conserve the biodiversity we have left.
The problem is that diversity itself exists in many different forms, especially in biology. “Just like with carbon, you can't come up with a single number for biodiversity,” he says. andy hector at Oxford University. “It's much more complicated.”
We already have ways to measure biodiversity. So you can see that it's declining rapidly. They boil down to what biologists think of as aspects of biodiversity. One of the most basic is species richness. This is simply the number of species present in a particular location at a particular time. It is used extensively and in some cases…
Source: www.newscientist.com
