Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the variety of different types of life found on earth. It is a measure of the variety of organisms present in different ecosystems. This can refer to genetic variation, ecosystem variation, or species variation (number of species) within an area, biome, or planet. Terrestrial biodiversity tends to be highest near the equator, which seems to be the result of the warm climate and high primary productivity. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth. It is the richest in the tropics. Marine biodiversity tends to be highest along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is highest and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity. Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots,[5] and has been increasing through time but will be likely to slow in the future.

Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions. More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.

The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates at least from 3.5 billion years ago, during the Eoarchean Era after a geological crust started to solidify following the earlier molten Hadean Eon. There are microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia. Other early physical evidence of a biogenic substance is graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old met sedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland. Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity. The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity via the Cambrian explosion—a period during which the majority of multicellular phyla first appeared. The next 400 million years included repeated, massive biodiversity losses classified as mass extinction events. In the Carboniferous, rainforest collapse led to a great loss of plant and animal life. The Permian–Triassic extinction event, 251 million years ago, was the worst; vertebrate recovery took 30 million years. The most recent, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago and has often attracted more attention than others because it resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts, particularly habitat destruction. Conversely, biodiversity impacts human health in a number of ways, both positively and negatively.

Continue reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity

Some points and questions for yourself:

  • What is polyculture and monoculture?
  • Why is biodiversity important?
  • Which system increases biodiversity? Which system harms biodiversity?
  • Are GMO’s helpful to decrease pesticide use? Is the fear of GMOs founded?
  • The characteristics of local forested areas, which may include woodlands, urban forests, schoolyard trees, and/or tree farms, and compare these characteristics to the forested areas of another country.
  • Look carefully for organisms in the world around you.
  • Greatest Mysteries: How Many Species Exist on Earth?
  • What are some of the issues that make it difficult for scientists to determine the number of species on the planet?
  • The interdependency of living and non-living things and
  • The inevitable impact of all human activity on the environment, and the consequences.
  • Get to know names of plants and animals and relationship between them.
  • Food Chains

Some pages for your understanding if you want to see them

Guide to GMOs

https://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.php

Overview of polyculture

https://www.satavic.org/cropping_systems.htm

PBS: The Botany of Desire – Control Lesson

https://www.pbs.org/thebotanyofdesire/lesson-plan-control.php

Wikipedia article on polyculture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture

Wikipedia article on Monoculture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture

Greatest Mysteries: How Many Species Exist on Earth?

https://www.livescience.com/strangenews/070803_gm_numberspecies.html

Food Chain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_chain

 

Task to do in your Country

You are asked to prepare a box:

The box may include:

  • Student written descriptions
  • Collage of pictures from a local ecosystem (river, coolie, prairie, downtown, housing development, a picture of Bismarck from aril view, etc.)
  • Drawings of local trees, plants, and animals
  • A video of local sounds and sights
  • Natural objects (leaves, nuts, cones, pressed flowers, rocks)

The people who will receive the  box will not know much about your region/country so you  have to fill the  box with helpful clues as to what your environment is like.