Threads to Biodiversity (for world)

Extinction is a natural event and, from a geological perspective, routine. We now know that most species that have ever lived have gone extinct. The average rate over the past 200 my is 1-2 species per year, and 3-4 families per my. The average duration of a species is 2-10 million years (based on last 200 million years). There have also been occasional episodes of mass extinction, when many taxa representing a wide array of lifeforms have gone extinct in the same blink of geological time.
In the modern era, due to human actions, species and ecosystems are threatened with destruction to an extent rarely seen in earth history. Probably only during the handful of mass extinction events have so many species been threatened, in so short a time.
  • Biodiversity refers to the number and variety of species, of ecosystems, and of the genetic variation contained within species.
  • Roughly 1.4 million species are known to science, but because many species are undescribed, an estimated 10-30 million species likely exists at present.
  • Biodiversity is threatened by the sum of all human activities. It is useful to group threats into the categories of over-hunting, habitat destruction, invasion of non-native species, domino effects, pollution, and climate change.
  • Habitat loss presents the single greatest threat to world biodiversity, and the magnitude of this threat can be approximated from species-area curves and rates of habitat loss. The spread of non-native species threatens many local species with extinction, and pushes the world's biota toward a more homogeneous and widely distributed sub-set of survivors. Climate change threatens to force species and ecosystems to migrate toward higher latitudes, with no guarantee of suitable habitat or access routes. These three factors thus are of special concern.

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