Human Impacts Toward Soil Biodiversity

Species diversity is characterised by the diversity within an ecological community (McGinley, 2014) that incorporates both the total number of species in a region and the degree to which the abundance of each of the species is similar; these concepts are termed species richness and species evenness respectively. The Simpson’s Index of Diversity is a measure of the biodiversity within a community and is derived the number of species and their relative abundances (Knox et al., 2014). The Simpson’s Index of Diversity score ranges from 0-1; the higher the score indicates a higher diversity.

Did you know that in 1990 there were only 2,500 Hyacinth Macaws left living in the will. In our paper we will discuss how humans affect the rainforest, endangered hyacinth macaws, and how we can prevent humans from destroying rainforests.

• Conducted a PCA and MANOVA statistical tests of thousands of species to determine results.

Both human and physical factors impact upon ecosystems due to their holistic nature which means that even small changes in the human or physical environment around them can cause an exponential chain of results. However these factors can be both positive and negative to varying degrees.

To investigate the results at site level, we used exact Chi square test in SPSS to study the effect of altitude and flow regime on canopy cover as well as the distribution of species according to soil types as recorded during the survey (A: Limestone; B: Sandstone; C: Basalt; D: Alluvial; E: mixed A+B; F: marl: G: mixed A+B+C). At species level, we conducted a one way ANOVA (Duncan test) to classify riparian species based on (R) and study the distribution of the identified riparian species according to slope, altitude, and dry period

In general species alter biodiversity one of the example of human activity is the land use change. Human transformed a percentage between 40-50 of the ice-free land surface and also also changing prairies, forest and wetland into agricultural and urban system. The other example is by adding a species to the population and that has effect to other species in the area.

The Shannon Diversity Index is a diversity index in ecological literature. The idea is that

After performing our experiment we came to the conclusion that the amount of woody litter mass did not have a statistically significant effect on the amount of soil invertebrate diversity of an area. In each of the different areas, the P-Values were above 0.05 meaning that there was no significant correlation between woody litter mass and soil invertebrate diversity. There were 36 total invertebrates found between all the areas we measured with 8 different species. We also found that species diversity between all the groups ended up being 1.27 which means the diversity in the environments was very low. The evenness was 0.71 which is closer to 1, so the communities

Biomes is an area on earth that can be classified according to plants and animals that live there. Each biome consists of many ecosystems whose communities have adapted to the small differences in climate and the environment inside the biome. There are many different types of biomes on earth’s surface. The divisions are based on climate patterns, soil types, animals, and plants that inhabit the area. There are five basic types of biomes which includes; desert, aquatic, grasslands, forest, and tundra.

By evaluating the Shannon diversity index, we were able to determine that Location 1 had the most diversity considering the higher the Shannon diversity index, the more diverse the habit. During the transect survey, Location 1 had a diversity index of 2.451 and Location 2 had a diversity index of 2.320. For the point-count surveys, Location 1 had a diversity index of 2.398 and Location 2 had a diversity index of 1.792. These values are represented in Table 1.

The African Grasslands are areas where the vegetation is dominated by grasses and other herbaceous (non-woody) plants. Grasslands cover nearly 50 percent of the land surface of the continent of Africa. While grasslands in general support diverse wildlife, given the lack of hiding places for predators, the African Savannah regions support a much greater diversity in wildlife than do temperate grasslands. The root systems of perennial grasses and forbs form complex mats that hold the soil in place. Mites, insect larvae and earthworms inhabit deep soil, which can reach 20 feet underground in undisturbed grasslands on the richest soils of the world. These invertebrates, along with symbiotic fungi, extend the root

The general analysis of invertebrate richness and diversity prove that shallow leaf litter is more biodiverse than deep leaf litter. From graph 2, shallow leaf litter is proven to be more biodiverse where the spread of invertebrate richness is higher with a relatively low rate of error denoted by the low standard deviation. Similarly, figure 6 also shows a similar trend where the mean of shallow leaf litter diversity was greater than deep leaf litter. The mean results of invertebrate abundance also show shallow leaf litter to be more abundant, however this is affected by the extreme outlier seen in figure 2, where there is a large leeway for error due to the high standard deviation. This may be due to human error due to transcription, an error in counting the amount of species or the designated shallow leaf litter contained species that were extremely common, providing a large abundance value. However, figure 1 and the comparison of boxplots in graph 1, show the overall values of deep leaf litter are centred higher, indicating that deep leaf litter has greater abundance, excluding outliers.

1. Create a food web to analyze the importance of each organism within the web.

As far as we can say, intelligent, modern humans have been around for roughly 50,000 years, and in that time have altered the earth beyond recognition (Morrison, 2006). Most evident in recent years, the rapidity of technological advances both during and post the industrial revolution has been astonishing, but has come with a hefty ecological price. There is wide scientific consensus that we are presently witnessing the obsolescence of species on a prodigious scale. We are now having to accept the possibility that humans might just be a contributing influence.

Humans have existed since 200,000 years but the Earth has existed around 4.5 billion years. Nature has provided us with everything we have today - food, medicines, materials, chemicals, metals, minerals etc. It can only keep providing us when we maintain the right environment for it to exist. This environment depends on the biodiversity of Earth. The number of species of plants, animals and microorganisms and the various genes in these species, different ecosystems such as deserts, rainforests and coral reefs are all part of a biologically diverse Earth. Hence Biodiversity impacts everything. We will discuss how Biodiversity plays a crucial role on social, environmental, and economic factors. We will also discuss what