Maintaining Biodiversity

This lesson covers: 

1. Ecological and environmental reasons for conserving biodiversity
2. Economic reasons for conserving biodiversity
3. Aesthetic and ethical reasons for conserving biodiversity

Ecological reasons for conserving biodiversity

Maintaining biodiversity is vital for healthy, functioning ecosystems, due to the complex interdependencies within them.

Ecological reasons for conserving biodiversity:

• Food webs rely on multiple species, so declines in certain species can disrupt food chains.
• Losing keystone species that have disproportionately large effects on their environments destabilises these ecosystems.
• Nutrient cycles depend on decomposers recycling matter like carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous through ecosystems.
• Provides resilience to a changing climate, other abiotic stresses, and disease.

Environmental reasons for conserving biodiversity

It is also important to conserve biodiversity for the benefits that it provides to the environment in general.

Environmental reasons to maintain biodiversity:

• Diverse ecosystems provide environmental services.
• Forests and peat bogs absorb carbon dioxide.
• Organic waste material is broken down by microorganisms.

Economic reasons to maintain biodiversity

Diverse ecosystems can support industries by immediately providing useful products, or mechanisms for protecting future profits.

Some products that diverse ecosystems directly provided to the economy include:

• Food production.
• Renewable energy and fuel source production.
• Industry and raw material compounds like timber, fabric, latex, biofuels, and pesticides.
• Many medicines (like aspirin or morphine) originate from living organisms.
• Wildlife and natural scenery is a source of income for many countries through tourism (ecotourism).
• Microorganisms are the source of many useful products, including antibiotics.

Protecting genetic diversity supports future industry by providing:

• Gene sources for future medicines.
• Genetic resources from the wild relatives of cultivated crops to widen their genetic diversity, allowing new varieties of crops with desired traits to be bred.
• Resilience in useful organisms to a changing climate.
• Providing resilience against other abiotic stresses, disease, and pests.

Aesthetic reasons for conserving biodiversity

Conserving biodiversity also has aesthetic benefits.

These include:

• Enriching our environment and providing inspiration for musicians, artists, photographers, poets, and writers.
• Helping people recover from stress and injury.

Ethical reasons for conserving biodiversity

There are also ethical and moral reasons for conserving biodiversity.

These include:

• We have no right to drive other organisms to extinction as we share our planet with them.
• Instead, humans should protect and value these organisms.