Biodiversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth.

Biodiversity is
typically a measure of variation at the genetic, species, and ecosystem level.
[1] Terrestrial biodiversity is usually greater near the equator,[2] which is the
result of the warm climate and high primary productivity.[3] Biodiversity is
not distributed evenly on Earth, and is richest in the tropics. These tropical
forest ecosystems cover less than 10 percent of earth's surface, and contain
about 90 percent of the world's species.[4] Marine biodiversity is usually
highest along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is
highest, and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans. There are latitudinal
gradients in species diversity.[5] Biodiversity generally tends to cluster
in hotspots,[6] and has been increasing through time,[7][8] but will be likely to
slow in the future.[9]
Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions.[10][11]
[12] More than 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting
to over five billion species,[13] are estimated to be extinct.[14][15] Estimates
on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million,
[16] of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent
have not yet been described.[17] More recently, in May 2016, scientists
reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with
only one-thousandth of one percent described.[18] The total amount of
related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 1037 and weighs 50
billion tonnes.[19] In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been
estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon).[20] In July 2016,
scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal
Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms living on Earth.[21]
The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years.[22][23][24] The earliest
undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates at least from 3.5 billion years ago,
[25][26][27] during the Eoarchean Era after a geological crust started to solidify
following the earlier molten Hadean Eon. There are microbial
mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western
Australia.[28][29][30] Other early physical evidence of a biogenic
substance is graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old meta-sedimentary
rocks discovered in Western Greenland.[31] More recently, in 2015, "remains
of biotic life" were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.[32]
[33] According to one of the researchers, "If life arose relatively quickly on
Earth .. then it could be common in the universe."[32]
Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor
events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity.
The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in
biodiversity via the Cambrian explosion—a period during which the majority
of multicellular phyla first appeared.[34] The next 400 million years included
repeated, massive biodiversity losses classified as mass extinction events. In
the Carboniferous, rainforest collapse led to a great loss
of plant and animal life.[35] The Permian–Triassic extinction event, 251 million
years ago, was the worst; vertebrate recovery took 30 million years.[36] The
most recent, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million
 years ago and has often attracted more attention than others because it
resulted in the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.[37]
The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing
biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named
the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts,
particularly habitat destruction.[38] Conversely, biodiversity positively
impacts human health in a number of ways, although a few negative effects
are studied.[39]
The United Nations designated 2011–2020 as the United Nations Decade on
Biodiversity.[40] and 2021-2030 as the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem
Restoration [41] According to a 2019 Global Assessment Report on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by IPBES, 25% of plant and animal
species are threatened with extinction as the result of human activity.[42][43]
[44]
Contents
History of terminologyEdit

 1916 - The term biological diversity was used first by J. Arthur Harris in "The
Variable Desert," Scientific American, JSTOR 6182: "The bare statement that the
region contains a flora rich in genera and species and of diverse geographic origin
or affinity is entirely inadequate as a description of its real biological diversity."
 1975 - The term natural diversity was introduced (by The Science Division of
The Nature Conservancy in a 1975 study, "The Preservation of Natural Diversity.")
[
citation needed]
 1980 - Thomas Lovejoy introduced the term biological diversity to the
scientific community in a book.[45] It rapidly became commonly used.[46]
 1985 - According to Edward O. Wilson, the contracted form biodiversity was
coined by W. G. Rosen: "The National Forum on BioDiversity ... was conceived by
Walter G.Rosen ... Dr. Rosen represented the NRC/NAS throughout the planning
stages of the project. Furthermore, he introduced the term biodiversity".[47]
 1985 - The term "biodiversity" appears in the article, "A New Plan to Conserve
the Earth's Biota" by Laura Tangley. [48]
 1988 - The term biodiversity first appeared in a publication. [49][50]
 The present - the term has achieved widespread use.

DefinitionsEdit

Prior termEdit
"Biodiversity" is most commonly used to replace the more clearly defined
and long established terms, species diversity and species richness.
Alternate termsEdit
Biologists most often define biodiversity as the "totality
of genes, species and ecosystems of a region".[51][52] An advantage of this
definition is that it seems to describe most circumstances and presents a
unified view of the traditional types of biological variety previously identified:
 taxonomic diversity (usually measured at the species diversity level)
 ecological diversity (often viewed from the perspective of ecosystem
diversity)
 morphological diversity (which stems from genetic diversity and molecular
diversity[53])
 functional diversity (which is a measure of the number of functionally
disparate species within a population (e.g. different feeding mechanism, different
motility, predator vs prey, etc.)[54]) This multilevel construct is consistent with
Datman and Lovejoy.

Wilcox 1982Edit
An explicit definition consistent with this interpretation was first given in a
paper by Bruce A. Wilcox commissioned by the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) for the 1982 World
National Parks Conference. Wilcox's definition was "Biological diversity is the
variety of life forms...at all levels of biological systems (i.e., molecular,
organismic, population, species and ecosystem)...".[55]
Genetic: Wilcox 1984Edit
Biodiversity can be defined genetically as the diversity of alleles, genes
and organisms. They study processes such as mutation and gene
transfer that drive evolution.[55]
United Nations 1992Edit
The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit defined "biological diversity" as "the
variability among living organisms from all sources, including, 'inter
alia', terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological
complexes of which they are part: this includes diversity within species,
between species and of ecosystems".[56] This definition is used in the United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.[56]
Gaston and Spicer 2004Edit
Gaston & Spicer's definition in their book "Biodiversity: an introduction" is
"variation of life at all levels of biological organization".[57]
DistributionEdit
A conifer forest in the Swiss Alps (National Park)

Biodiversity is not evenly distributed, rather it varies greatly across the globe
as well as within regions. Among other factors, the diversity of all living
things (biota) depends
on temperature, precipitation, altitude, soils, geography and the presence of
other species. The study of the spatial distribution of organisms, species
and ecosystems, is the science of biogeography.
Diversity consistently measures higher in the tropics and in other localized
regions such as the Cape Floristic Region and lower in polar regions
generally. Rain forests that have had wet climates for a long time, such
as Yasuníí National Park in Ecuador, have particularly high biodiversity.[58][59]
Terrestrial biodiversity is thought to be up to 25 times greater than ocean
biodiversity.[60] A new method used in 2011, put the total number of species
on Earth at 8.7 million, of which 2.1 million were estimated to live in the
ocean.[61] However, this estimate seems to under-represent the diversity of
microorganisms.
Latitudinal gradientsEdit
Main article: Latitudinal gradients in species diversity

Generally, there is an increase in biodiversity from the poles to the tropics.

Thus localities at lower latitudes have more species than localities at higher
latitudes. This is often referred to as the latitudinal gradient in species
diversity. Several ecological factors may contribute to the gradient, but the
ultimate factor behind many of them is the greater mean temperature at the
equator compared to that of the poles.[62][63][64]
Even though terrestrial biodiversity declines from the equator to the poles,
[65] some studies claim that this characteristic is unverified in aquatic
ecosystems, especially in marine ecosystems.[66] The latitudinal distribution
of parasites does not appear to follow this rule.[67]
In 2016, an alternative hypothesis ("the fractal biodiversity") was proposed
to explain the biodiversity latitudinal gradient.[68] In this study,
the species pool size and the fractal nature of ecosystems were combined to
clarify some general patterns of this gradient. This hypothesis
considers temperature, moisture, and net primary production (NPP) as the
main variables of an ecosystem niche and as the axis of the
ecological hypervolume. In this way, it is possible to build fractal
hypervolumes, whose fractal dimension rises up to three moving towards
the equator.
HotspotsEdit
A biodiversity hotspot is a region with a high level of endemic species that
have experienced great habitat loss.[69] The term hotspot was introduced in
1988 by Norman Myers.[70][71][72][73] While hotspots are spread all over the
world, the majority are forest areas and most are located in the tropics.
Brazil's Atlantic Forest is considered one such hotspot, containing roughly
20,000 plant species, 1,350 vertebrates and millions of insects, about half of
which occur nowhere else.[74][citation needed] The island
of Madagascar and India are also particularly notable. Colombia is
characterized by high biodiversity, with the highest rate of species by area
unit worldwide and it has the largest number of endemics (species that are
not found naturally anywhere else) of any country. About 10% of the species
of the Earth can be found in Colombia, including over 1,900 species of bird,
more than in Europe and North America combined, Colombia has 10% of the
world's mammals species, 14% of the amphibian species and 18% of the bird
species of the world.[75] Madagascar dry deciduous forests and lowland
rainforests possess a high ratio of endemism.[76][citation needed] Since the island
separated from mainland Africa 66 million years ago, many species and
ecosystems have evolved independently.[77] Indonesia's 17,000 islands cover
735,355 square miles (1,904,560 km2) and contain 10% of the
world's flowering plants, 12% of mammals and 17%
of reptiles, amphibians and birds—along with nearly 240 million people.
[78] Many regions of high biodiversity and/or endemism arise from
specialized habitats which require unusual adaptations, for
example, alpine environments in high mountains, or Northern
European peat bogs.[citation needed]