What is ecosystem and how it related with the biodiversity?
Answers
Answer:
It has been shown that biodiversity of an area has a large impact on the ecosystem stability of that area. Areas with high levels of species and genetic diversity are likely to have a more complex ecosystem, with a variety of food webs and biotic interactions.
Explanation:
Explanation:
What Is Biodiversity?
Did you know there are more than 10,000 species of birds, 200,000 species of flowering plants and almost one million species of insects in the world? The number of species identified has increased substantially in recent years, and there are over 1.5 million species currently known. Although this number might seem large, it is thought that this number is actually only a fraction of the number of species that exist today. New species are being identified every day, and it is estimated that there are anywhere between three and fifty million different species living on Earth.
When discussing the number of species on earth, the term biodiversity is often mentioned. Biodiversity, also known as biological diversity, is the variety of life on Earth across all of the different levels of biological organization. On a smaller scale, biodiversity can be used to describe the variety in the genetic makeup of a species, and on a larger scale, it can be used to describe the variety of ecosystem types.
Recent theoretical and experimental work provides clear evidence that biodiversity loss can have profound impacts on functioning of natural and managed ecosystems and the ability of ecosystems to deliver ecological services to human societies. Work on simplified ecosystems in which the diversity of a single trophic level is manipulated shows that diversity can enhance ecosystem processes such as primary productivity and nutrient retention. Theory also strongly suggests that biodiversity can act as biological insurance against potential disruptions caused by environmental changes. However, these studies generally concern a single trophic level, primary producers for the most part. Changes in biodiversity also affect ecosystem functioning through trophic interactions. Here we review, through the analysis of a simple ecosystem model, several key aspects inherent in multitrophic systems that may strongly affect the relationship between diversity and ecosystem processes. Our analysis shows that trophic interactions have a strong impact on the relationships between diversity and ecosystem functioning, whether the ecosystem property considered is total biomass or temporal variability of biomass at the various trophic levels. In both cases, food-web structure and trade-offs that affect interaction strength have major effects on these relationships. Multitrophic interactions are expected to make biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships more complex and non-linear, in contrast to the monotonic changes predicted for simplified systems with a single trophic level.