Biodiversity
One important renewable
resource is biological diversity, or biodiversity: the different forms of life
and life-sustaining processes that can best survive the variety of conditions
currently found on Earth. At the most general level it refers to the
variety to be found among living organisms throughout the Earth ( "the variability among living organisms from all sources, including,
'inter alia', terrestrial,
marine, and other aquatic ecosystems, and the ecological
complexes of which they are part : this includes diversity within species,
between species and of ecosystems"). It is an important quality of landscape
beauty.
The biodiversity found on Earth today consists of many millions of distinct
biological species,
which is the product of nearly 3.5
billion years of evolution. Biodiversity
has developed through biological evolution. Understanding biological evolution
is the key to understanding biodiversity
Fig.: Some of the
biodiversity of coral reefs
Kinds
of Biological Diversity
Kinds
of biodiversity include the following:
1. Genetic diversity:
the total number of genetic characteristics, sometimes of a
specific species, subspecies, or group of
species.
2. Habitat (Ecological) diversity:
the diversity of habitats in a given unit area.
3. Species diversity:
which has three aspects:
(a) Species richness—the
total number of species.
(b) Species evenness—the
relative abundance of species.
(c) Species dominance—the
most abundant species.
No comments:
Post a Comment