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Conservation Biology and Biodiversity

Conservation Biology and Biodiversity

Satellite image shows a large blue lake surrounded by green land.
Lake Victoria in Africa, shown in this satellite image, was the site of one of the most extraordinary evolutionary findings on the planet, as well as a casualty of devastating biodiversity loss. (credit: modification of work by Rishabh Tatiraju, using NASA World Wind software)

In the 1980s, biologists working in Lake Victoria in Africa discovered one of the most extraordinary products of evolution on the planet. Located in the Great Rift Valley, Lake Victoria is an enormous and deep lake about 68,900 km² in area (larger than Lake Huron, the second largest of North America’s Great Lakes). Biologists were studying species of a family of fish called cichlids. When they sampled for fish in different locations of the lake, the researchers identified over 500 evolved species in total. However, the scientists soon discovered that the invasive Nile Perch was destroying the lake’s cichlid population, bringing hundreds of cichlid species to extinction with devastating rapidity.

Sections

  • The Biodiversity Crisis — biodiversity in terms of species diversity and abundance, biodiversity as the equilibrium of naturally fluctuating rates of extinction and speciation, and historical causes of high extinction rates in Earth’s history.
  • The Importance of Biodiversity to Human Life — chemical diversity benefits to humans, biodiversity components that support human agriculture, and ecosystem services.
  • Threats to Biodiversity — significant threats to biodiversity, the effects of habitat loss, the introduction of exotic species, and hunting, and the early and predicted effects of climate change on biodiversity.
  • Preserving Biodiversity — new technologies and methods for describing biodiversity, the legislative framework for conservation, principles and challenges of conservation preserve design, examples of the effects of habitat restoration, and the role of zoos in biodiversity conservation.

This chapter is adapted from Biology 2e, Chapter 47: Conservation Biology and Biodiversity by Mary Ann Clark, Jung Choi, Matthew Douglas, and OpenStax, © OpenStax, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access the original for free at openstax.org. Each section page records its own changes from the source. Changes: the chapter-opening image is the source’s, re-encoded for the web, with its source alt kept since it already says what it shows; the source’s unit superscript (“68,900 km2”) is set as Unicode (“68,900 km²”).

Biogeochemical CyclesThe Biodiversity Crisis