Biodiversity Flashcards
What is biological diversity?
the variety of all forms of life, from genes to species, through to the broad scale of ecosystems
Why is biodiversity important?
- Functionally: diversity helps living systems survive and thrive
- Culturally: intrinsic and instrumental values
What is intrinsic value?
Organisms are valuable in their own right, regardless of their use to people
- e.g. striped beetles have their own reasons for being
What is the use instrumental values?
use value: organisms provide us with things we need or want
e.g. food, medicine (present and future)
what is the non-use instrumental values?
non-use value: we benefit from biodiversity without using it up
- aesthetic value (enjoy a nice sunset)
- existence value (feel good knowing pandas exist)
- bequest value (protect for future generations)
What is Anthropocentric?
human-centred
what is Ecocentric?
nature-centred
What biodiversity is under threat?
mass extinction events
- 96% of marine species, 70% of land species extinct
- caused by meteorite or major volcanic activity
- half of all species extinct including dinosaurs
- probably caused by asteroid or comet
present day
- mass extinction event caused by human activities
What are the threats to biodiversity?
- habitat change
- invasive species
- pollution
- climate change
What has happened to habitat change?
- land surface altered
- ocean area experiencing increasing cumulative impacts
- wetland areas lost
What are the causes to habitat changes?
- deforestation and forest fragmentation
- urban sprawl
- agriculture, aquaculture
- resource extraction and industry
What are invasive species?
introduced species that change the competitive balance of an ecosystem
what can invasive species do?
can crowd out, replace or kill native species
- hard to remove or control
What are the impacts of chemical and wastes on the environment?
- industrial releases: regular and accidental
- wastewater: treated and untreated
- leaching of stored wastes
What are the types of pollution caused by waste?
- air pollution
- radioactive waste
What can climate change cause?
- contribute to habitat change
- shift growing and breeding seasons (altering food supplies)
- help pests and invasive species to spread (faster than species can adapt)
What are biodiversity hotspots?
areas with high species diversity and impacts from human activities
How many biodiversity hotspots are recognized globally?
Conversation International recognizes 35 hotspots around the world
Why are biodiversity hotspots important?
Cover only 2% of earth’s land area, but half of plant species and 42% of land vertebrates are endemic to hotspots – they live only in those regions
What is Arturo Escobar’s perspective on biodiversity?
- bio diversity not only biological concept - it also has a social meaning
- cultural difference and political autonomy for Indigenous people can be seen as part of biodiveristy
What is Fortress conservation?
an approach to conservation that defines protected areas and restricts human activities inside them
e.g. US National Parks
What is the significance of the Fortress conservation?
- credited with protecting some species and landscapes
-criticized for social impacts, especially on Native Americans prevented from hunting, fishing and gathering
What was the problem with fortress conservation in parks?
- in NA and Africa, those designating parks saw areas sparsely populated by humans
- both cases, thriving Indigenous populations had been wiped out
- NA: human diseases
- Africa: cattle disease and human disease
How did the tsetse fly transform African landscapes?
- Rinderpest (cattle disease) wiped out livestock
- without grazing, vegetation grew higher, improving conditions for the tsetse fly (transmit sleeping sickness)
- when people + cattle tried to move back to areas where they used to live, they couldn’t due to sleeping sickness
- colonialist assumed landscapes had always been full of wildlife and empty of people + created parks reinforcing this pattern
What was the problems with fortress conservation for people and wildlife?
- fortress conservation enforces the idea that people and wildlife should live separately
- protected areas have often worsened poverty (cost and benefits of conservation are unequally distributed)
- fencing wildlife in and people out can harm both (animals need to migrate, people need forest resources to live)
-without fences, animals don’t stay inside lines on a map (human-wildlife conflict)
- policing boundaries causes human-human conflicts
Ex. Project Tiger, India
What are the alternatives to fortress conservation?
community based conservation
ex. black rhinos in Namibia
- govt transfer wildlife management to local people
- insurance compensate ppl for wildlife dmg
- issued 5 trophy hunting permits/yr with high fees that fund conservation
- black rhino # increase
