Can Biodiversity loss be the downfall of an ecosystem and human well being?

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Recommended: biodiversity loss and extinction

People often say "Why should I care if a species goes extinct? It’s not essential to my daily life”. But what use are humans, really? We waste a lot of resources and have managed to damage the ecosystem without a second thought. Eliminating species to extinction, destroying plants and trees a critical part of human well-being and organisms in an ecosystem leading to tremendous consequences.
Organisms depend on each other for survival and the loss of one species can greatly alter the balance of an ecosystem as a whole, as seen in the Yellowstone National Park ecosystem. Gray wolves were poached to extinction from Yellowstone during the early twentieth century, then were reintroduced to restore a complete food web. Researchers, Marshall, Hobbs and Cooper the authors of “Stream hydrology limits recovery of riparian ecosystems after wolf reintroduction” suggested “excessive browsing of willows by elk after wolves were gone was implicated in the disappearance of beavers from streams". Furthermore, when the gray wolves disappeared the willows were terminated by elk glazing and with no willows to slow stream flow, creeks flowed faster and beavers prefer slow-moving water, so they disappeared as well. In addition, when the wolves were reintroduced they hunted elk and brought down numbers of these. But, removing elk glazing wasn't enough for the willows, needing slow streams created by beavers allowing more willows to grow. Alan Tessier, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology whom funded the concludes "the research illustrates the value of long-term ecological experiments to understanding how species interactions cascade through food webs to determine ecosystem resilience”. Theref...

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...vores, meaning no food for carnivores, meaning much quicker extinction of all life.
In conclusion, losing even a small strand in the web of life contributes to the unraveling of our planet's sustainability, and that makes a difference to each one of us.

Works Cited

Marshall Kristen N, Hobbs N. Thompson and Copper David J. “Stream hydrology limits recovery

of riparian ecosystems after wolf reintroduction”. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological

Sciences. Vol. 280. (2013).

"Traditional Medicine." (2003) World Heath Organization. Web. 11 Mar 2014.

"Facts and figures on biodiversity." (2012) The International Union for Conservation of Nature. Web. 11 Mar 2014.

Chivian, Eric and Bernstein, Aaron. “Sustaining Life: How Our Health Depends On Biodiversity”. 2008. Print.

"How much do oceans add to world’s oxygen?." (2013) Earth sky. Web. 11 Mar 2014.

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