Biodiversity Essay

This tundra region spans an area of 26 million hectares. Around 24.2% of the land is covered by slow-growing forest. The remaining area is dominated by bogs, fens, and thousands of small lakes and ponds. Two-thirds of the area in this region is covered by muskeg, a type of acidic soil. There are a variety of organisms that inhabit this region. The most common tree species, all deciduous, are the white birch, dwarf birch, and willow. Animal species include, but are not limited to, the woodland caribou

Global Biodiversity: Indicators and Decline Quantitative Methods Study: Marine Trophic Level Data Replication Study overview: In response to millennium goals set by the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) which aimed to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in biodiversity loss”, world leaders created a “framework of indicators to measure biodiversity loss at the level of genes, population, species and ecosystems.” The authors of this paper compiled 31 of these indicators to report on progress towards

The most drastic influences of human modifications result from urbanisation, a progression characterised by human disturbance, buildings and other artificial infrastructure (Hahs and McDonnell 2006). Such modifications have significant effects on biodiversity, often with little thought being given to the long term effects and ways of mitigating them. In most cases, human alteration of the environment has reduced biological diversity by replacing the native flora with new ecological spaces. However

In today’s society, we have become consumed within the materialistic aspects of a lavished lifestyle. Human nature commonly functions on the concept of we want what we can not have. However, conceptualized in “Walden,” as well as “Silent Spring,” we must work with nature not against it. Over time, agricultural technologies have developed, this complex system has encountered a number of changes on many different levels. There are an abundant amount of ways in which our system produces and distributes

critical in shaping ecosystem structure and function (Berger et al., 2001; Hawlena and Schmitz, 2010). Predator-prey interactions can alter community composition (Kneite and Chase, 2004), mediate trophic cascades (Mooney et al., 2010), increase biodiversity (Letnic and Ritchie, 2012), and affect species invasions (Snyder et al. 2004). Furthermore, predators can control the dynamics of prey populations by influencing such aspects as survival, growth, behavior, size structure, and distribution (Beauchamp

That means that if plants are suffering everything else will be as well. In recent years, human interference has become more apparent than previous. Human consumption of natural resources has led to the warming of the earth and lose of habitats. Biodiversity across the globe has declined and been threatened. This threat is the most

A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its ecosystem relative to its population’s size. There are three main types of keystone species, the predator species who feed on other animals which helps balance out the ecosystem The Mutualists who have mutually beneficial interactions with other organisms and lastly the engineer species that will burrow into ground which can be used as shelter for another animal. Without these important species several ecosystems would

“If we can keep these reserves from suffering degradation, then we can actually protect a substantial part of the diversity in the Amazon,” said Hans ter Steege, a tropical ecologist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper. Stephen P. Hubbell, a tropical forest ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, said that he was impressed by the data the researchers had

Considering the water quality, the total wastewater discharged into the reservoir-reach amounts to 1.2 billion tons annually (Wang, 2002). TGP does not generate pollution itself but it will aggravate the pollution belts, because of higher water level and slower velocity. The Chinese government decided that all the industrial pollutants must be treated to reach the (official) discharge standards by 2000. A number of small enterprises that discharge heavy pollution, such as paper mills, have already

The first of these eight points relates to the intrinsic value of nature as seen by deep ecologists. Intrinsic value believes that nature has value in itself and its value is not calculated by what it can offer humans. Naess explains intrinsic value in more depth by stating that “The presence of inherent value in a natural object is independent of any awareness, interest, or appreciation of it by any conscious being.” (Naess, 189) Naess and deep ecologists therefore conclude that giving intrinsic