Biodiversity Loss

What is biodiversity and why is important?

Biodiversity is a contraction of biological diversity. It refers the number, variety and variability of living organisms and how these change from one location to another and over time.

Worldwide there are an estimated 5 to 30 million species of animals and plants, each genetically unique. Most remain unidentified. Some 1.4 million animal species alive today have been named and described. Named plant species are far fewer, numbering around 400,000. Biodiversity is not uniformly distributed over the earth’s surface. The tropics cover 42% of all land but contain two-thirds of all animal species. Rain-forests cover 6 % of all land but contain two-fifths of all plant and animal species. Comprehensive measurement of biodiversity is difficult. However, we can compare numbers of species between sites as a simple index of relative biodiversity.

This is the link you can find information about biodiversity; 
http://www.jri.org.uk/brief/biodiversity.htm

This is the link of number of species in the world;http://www.greenfacts.org/en/biodiversity/figtableboxes/1011-species-nb.htm


Biodiversity is really important, because, "biodiversity" benefits so much to human, to world, to our lives, more than we realise. 
Biodiversity supports ecosystem services including air quality, climate (e.g., CO2 sequestration), water purification, pollination, and prevention of erosion.


Pollination; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollination
Prevention of erosion; http://www.chesapeakebay.net/erosionrestoration.aspx?menuitem=14750


Biodiversity Loss in Rockström


Biodiversity is so important for global and some changes in biodiversity effects global, and definetly effects our lives. 
For example, if a loss happens in biodiversity, we can see increase the vulnerability(losing safe) of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to changes in climate and ocean acidity, thus reducing the safe boundary levels for these processes.


                               Threshold of Biodiversity Loss:

Species play different roles in ecosystems, in the sense of having different effects on ecosystem processes and different responses to shifts in the physical or biotic environment. Species loss, therefore, affects both the functioning of ecosystems and their potential to respond and adapt to changes in physical and biotic conditions. 

• Currently %25 of species in well-studied taxonomic groups are threatened with extinction.
• %12 for birds, %52 for cycads. 

         This is a information about cycads. 

         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycad

• Last years recently most extinctions occured on oceanic islands. 

About half of the recorded extinctions have occurred on continents, primarily due to land-use change, species introductions, and increasingly climate change, indicating that biodiversity is now broadly at risk throughout the planet.

Suggestion; 
Suggestion is, using extinction rate as a substitute. 

(Because humanity has done undesired change that we can not exclude any more)

Suggestion, indicating a safe planetary boundary,

and recommended 10 - 100 E/MSY

is a safe extinction rate for planetary boundary. 

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/subject/8107/The-Biodiversity-Comics-and-Cartoons.php

Planetary Boundary

Hi everyone!! With this entry i will try to give an example about one boundary of our planet. As we know our planet has a boundary about carbon dioxyde. And the rate of carbon dioxyde is increasing day by day. 

And today, rate of carbon dioxyde is: 

If this rate increase like this, we will have to face some problems. Main problem is; "Climate Change". With climate change brings another problems and these are really effective for our lives. 

Increasing of corbon dioxyde rate and Climate Change will bring this problems for us: 

• melting of icebergs
• damages on potable water
• damages on climate system
• decrease on biological diversity

Thanks for reading. I hope you liked it and i hope it is useful for everyone. 

My name is Metin Gerçeker.  I am Erasmus student in Spain. But unfortunately I can not speak Spanish for now. Spanish is hard and very different language for me. But I am trying to learn. I am coming from Turkey. I study Science Education in Ankara, Turkey. I study Physics, Chemistry and Biology education. A little hard, and sometimes boring. And i also have to take phycology courses. I have to study so much different things. Maybe sometimes it is boring and hard but i can get information about so much things easily. I think it is great for me.


Enviroment is not my major but i always want to be aware the problems of world have, want to know all about the Earth that i'm living on it. And i also wanted to change that positively as a person. In Turkey I took courses about enviroment, too. I did volunteer work about enviroment. Now here, I wanted to take this course and wanted to have acquisition of knowledge how enviromental topics are come up in different country. In addition to this, i can take the opportunity to compare my country or other countries.