Importance Of Biodiversity

I think that high biodiversity is necessary for maintaining various ecosystem functions and services because when diversity allows for functions and services to take place. For example, in an ecosystem where there is less diverse, the organisms in that community are more susceptible to disease and are less resilient to disasters. Therefore, when there is less diversity the community will be less likely to be proactive in the community for functions like decomposition and nutrient cycling. Also, more diverse communities are more likely to include organisms that are very efficient at doing certain functions. A study I found, Perspectives on the link between ecosystem services and biodiversity: the assessment of the nursery function, talks about

Also when talking about islands, we need to take into account about metapopulations. So islands that are close to each other can exist as metapopultions for each other. If one population goes extinct on an island, another colony can come back and “replace”/rebuild that colony so there is never a true extinction on the islands. This is important to think about because if the metapopulations exist on large islands that are close to land, then there will always be some sort of immigration to and from the lands. This is why islands are so important for contributing to global biodiversity. Islands contain a huge amount of diversity, so as long as there is immigration and emigration between islands and land, there will always be metapopulations to help replace communities if they start to fail. The islands will have enough diversity to help keep land populations stable as long as multiple islands are not destroyed by a natural disaster

(4 pts). We do not know how many species are on earth. Describe one method scientists use to estimate this number.

One approach scientist are taking to try to estimate the number of species on the globe is by using data from different studies around the globe. The hope is that many countries will have studies going on to try to find the number of species in that area. Then once those studies are published, scientist try to estimate the ration between all of the different groups of species. Once this is done, they will then try to expand the ratio over the whole globe in hopes that this will give the most accurate answer to the number of species around the globe.

*Question 14. (6 pts). Wetlands provide many different types of ecosystem services. Give an example of a provisioning service they provide. Give an example of a regulating service they