Maintaining Biodiversity

This lesson covers: 

1. Ecological reasons for conserving biodiversity
2. Economic reasons for conserving biodiversity
3. Aesthetic 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.

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:

• 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 industries and the economy by providing:

• Gene sources for future medicines and products that have not yet been discovered.
• Resilience against a changing climate, other abiotic stresses, and disease to economically useful organisms.

Agricultural reasons to maintain biodiversity

Agriculture is vastly important to the world's economy, and to the general survival of the human population by providing food.

Monocultures that repeatedly grow single crops deplete soil nutrients. This is bad for agriculture, and therefore bad for the economy. 

Monocultures can cause:

• Lower crop yields.
• Reliance on expensive fertilisers.
• Overall reduced farm productivity.

Promoting diverse ecosystems in agricultural settings and preventing the use of monoculture can therefore be economically beneficial. 

Some other agricultural reasons for maintaining biodiversity include:

1. The wild relatives of cultivated crops provide the genetic resources to widen the genetic diversity of cultivated crops, allowing new varieties of crops with desired traits to be bred.
2. Genetic diversity provides a safeguard against diseases or pests.
3. Many crop plants rely on insect pollinators to reproduce.

Aesthetic reasons for conserving biodiversity

Conserving biodiversity has aesthetic benefits.

These include:

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