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
One of the often mentioned ones is the fragility of a monoculture ([the opposite of biodiversity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture), at least as far as farming goes). Problems include diseases spreading faster (biodiversity means microbes need to be biodiverse as well). The availability of food is also impacted; with plants, it means certain nutrients that are used in some plants but not others will be drained/built up faster than they can be replenished/drained with the soil.
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