Module 4: Land

Question 1

Sustaining biodiversity - what are the options?

Answer 1

Enact laws and treaties designed to protect biodiversity - global buy-in and enforcement is problematic.
- create and maintain wildlife refuges, seed banks, botanical gardens, zoos and equations play a positive role in captive breeding and education, but their scope is limited.
These options are limited in their effectiveness and are unsustainable

Question 2

What is a more sustainable approach?

Answer 2

A most effective and sustainable approach is to adopt the precautionary principle and protect biodiversity, even if we don’t fully understand the cause and effect relationships. We can preserve species and entire ecosystems by preventing serious environmental problems, including extinction. This is referred to as taking an ecosystems approach to sustaining biodiversity

Question 3

The ecosystems approach to sustaining biodiversity.

Answer 3

The ecosystems approach is the most effective way of sustaining biodiversity as it is holistic - it focussed on ecosystems, rather than the species alone.

Question 4

Ecosystems approach to protecting/ sustaining biodiversity (the four point plan)

Answer 4

1. Nappy global ecosystems and creating an inventory of species and ecosystem services.
2. Locating and protecting the most endangered ecosystems and species, particularly those with high plant biodiversity (biodiversity hotspots) and impaired ecosystem services.
3. Seek to restore as many degraded ecosystems as possible.
4. Implement biodiversity friendly development : provide financial incentives and technical help to provider landowners who agree to protect the endangered ecosystems - looking for ways for humans to expand their footprint while ensuring biodiversity can still exist and move from place to place

Question 5

What is a biodiversity hotspot (BD hotspot)?

Answer 5

BD hotspots are areas particularly rich on plant species ( an indicator of animal diversity) that are found nowhere else on earth, and are in danger of extinction.

Question 6

Protecting BD hotspots

Answer 6

Put policies in place to help protect them. Map them, creating inventories in these hot spots then pup policies in place to protect them

Question 7

What is ecological restoration?

Answer 7

The process of repairing damage caused by humans to the biodiversity and dynamics of natural ecosystems

Question 8

By studying how ecosystems recover, scientists are learning how to speed up restoration with a variety of approaches:

Answer 8

Restoration
Rehabilitation
Replacement
Creating artificial ecosystems

Question 9

What is restoration

Answer 9

Restoration is returning a system to a condition similar to its natural state. Looking carefully at what species used to be there and replacing the species that matched the habitat.

Question 10

What is rehabilitation?

Answer 10

Turning a degraded system into a functional and useful system without restoring it to its original state.

Question 11

What is replacement?

Answer 11

Replacing a degraded system with another type of ecosystem (e.g replacing degraded forest with a tree plantation)