Genuine question. I was talking to someone recently and they asked me this and while I had some answers (mentioned below), I didn’t have confidence in my answers.
I know climate change is a threat to biodiversity and that it’s important to preserve it but I was never told why biodiversity is important. Is it to keep ecosystems in check (I feel like this is probably one of the most important reasons)? Is it to just give humans a bunch of species to look at and appreciate? Is it to ensure that if the human population died, some forms of life would remain that would be fit for whatever catastrophe affected human populations and keep life going?
Is it all of these things? Any other reasons?
Thank you!
In: Biology
Every living thing plays multiple roles that we don’t always see. Sometimes the way we figure out that we need biodiversity is when we don’t have any! For example, industrial farming in the United States is single crop farming, and each plant has different individual needs of soil. Some plants suck all the nutrients out of soil and leave it pretty infertile. Other plants actually add nutrients to the soil, creating richer more fertile places for other plans to grow. When you have a balance of all the different kind of plants on soil, what you get is a cycle that both takes and gives nutrients to the soil. That’s a plant example at least!
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