Based on your knowledge of evolution, how do you think this concept applies to biodiversity? Explain your answer in not more than five sentences.
Answers
Answer:
Biodiversity has a key role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and thereby sustaining ecosystem services to the ever-growing human population. To get an idea of the range of ecosystem services that we use daily, think of how much energy and time it would cost to make Mars (or some other Earth-like planet) hospitable for human life, for example, in terms of atmosphere regulation, freshwater production, soil formation, nutrient cycles, regulation of climate, etc. On our own planet, that process took four billion years and required the contribution of a vast amount of functions performed by different life forms, ultimately driven by evolution and that is only the top of the (melting) iceberg.
Unfortunately, the ecosystems that we so exploit and dearly need for our long-term survival and welfare are jeopardized by our own actions. Global change, triggered by human activities, is all around us. The pervasive effects of climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation, overharvesting, pollution, altered nutrient cycling, invasive species and interactions thereof affect virtually all Earth's ecosystems (Rockström et al. 2009). With seven billion people consuming natural resources more rapidly than they are created, we are at the onset of a major environmental revolution. As a consequence, species are already shifting, expanding, disappearing, changing their behaviour and phenology, exploiting newly available food resources and abandoning scarcer ones. Ecosystems are changing too, driven by changes in environmental drivers and by the reshuffling of their biota into previously unknown combinations of species (Williams and Jackson 2007). The interplay of all these processes makes the forecast of changes in ecosystem services a daunting task.
All these changes are likely to have a bearing on and be influenced by the evolutionary forces at play. The main legacy of Charles Darwin was to make us realize that we owe everything, including the formation of our own species, to evolution. We thus learned that the history of life is driven by evolution. But what about the future? What is the contribution of evolution to these ecological changes? And, probably most relevant to policy: what is the potential of evolutionary processes to exacerbate or mitigate the effects of global change? Is evolutionary biology just a scientific gimmick compared to the real problems that we are facing? This volume deals exactly with these questions.