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Biodiversity
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INTRO: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name’s Peter Lizard. I’m a
science consultant for the Environmental Division of the Brno Service
Department.
The topic of my talk today is Biodiversity.
I’ve divided my talk into 4 parts. First of all, I’ll explain what the term
biodiversity means and then I'm going to deal with three types of biodiversity:
first, genetic diversity, second, species diversity and finally, ecosystem
diversity.
Please interrupt me, if there’s something which needs clarifying. Otherwise,
there’ll be time for discussion at the end.
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Let me start by the explanation of biodiversity. Biodiversity is the
shortened form of two words "biological" and "diversity". It refers to all the
variety of life that can be found on Earth (plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms) as well as to the communities that they form and the habitats in
which they live. The Convention on Biological Diversity gives a formal
definition of biodiversity in its Article 2.
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“biological diversity means 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 ecosystem”.
As you can see, biodiversity is not only the sum of all ecosystems, species and
genetic material. Rather, it represents the variability within and among them.
Thus, the term encompasses different ecosystems, species, genes, and their
relative abundance and differences.
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Let‘s move onto the classification of biodiversity. I am going to speak about
three particular types.
I would like to begin with genetic diversity. This refers to the variation of
genes within species. It covers distinct populations of the same species (such as
the thousands of traditional rice varieties in India) or genetic variation within a
populations. It is, for instance, high among Indian rhinos, and very low among
cheetahs.
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Let me turn now to species diversity which refers to the variety of species
within a region. Such diversity can be measured in many ways, and scientists
have not settled on a single best method. The number of species in a region -its species “richness” -- is one often-used measure, but a more precise
measurement, “taxonomic diversity”, also considers the relationship of
species to each other. For example, an island with 2 species of birds + 1 species
of lizard has a greater taxonomic diversity than an island with 3 species of
birds but 0 lizards.
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Well, this brings me to the third type of biodiversity, which is ecosystem
diversity. Ecosystem diversity refers to the diversity of habitats, communities
and ecological processes within the biosphere. It is harder to measure than
species or genetic diversity because the “boundaries” of communities -associations of species -- and ecosystems are elusive. Nevertheless, as long as a
consistent set of criteria is used to define communities, habitats and
ecosystems, their numbers and distribution can be measured as well.
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That covers everything I wanted to say about the topic. I‘d like to sum up now.
First we defined the term biodiversity and then we focused on three kinds of
biodiversity – genetic, species and ecosystem diversity.
In conclusion, I'd like to emphasise that the survival of each diversity is linked
to the health of the other two, and together they comprise the wealth of
ecosystems. Thank you for your attention. I’d be glad now to answer any
questions.
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