Cambio global, biodiversidad y bienestar humano: 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.