Ecology and Bio Diversitry

Institute of Mountain Research University of the Punjab Lahore

Bio Diversity of Ecosystem

Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions support fewer species. "totality of genes, species, and ecosystems of a region".

Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions. One estimate is that less than 1% of the species that have existed on Earth are extant. Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity.

Geological time Scale

The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity via the Cambrian explosiona period during which the majority of multicellular phyla first appeared. 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. The PermianTriassic extinction event, 251 million years ago, was the worst; vertebrate recovery took 30 million years.

The most recent, the CretaceousPaleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, and has often attracted more attention than others because it resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs

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. Conversely, biodiversity impacts human health in a number of ways, both positively and negatively.

Species diversity

Species diversity is the effective number of different species that are represented in a collection of individuals (a dataset). The effective number of species refers to the number of equally-abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of interest (where all species may not be equally abundant). Species diversity consists of two components, species richness and species evenness. Species richness is a simple count of species, whereas species evenness quantifies how equal the abundances of the species are.

Quardrent Analysis
Density equals mass per unit volume D###M/V
Species richness is the number of different species represented in a set or collection of individuals Species evenness refers to how close in numbers each species in an environment are Whittaker's idea was that the total species diversity in a landscape (gamma diversity) is determined by two different things, the mean species diversity in sites or habitats at a more local scale (alpha diversity) and the differentiation among those habitats (beta diversity).

Species Area Curve

In ecology, a species-area curve is a relationship between the area of a habitat, or of part of a habitat, and the number of species found within that area. Larger areas tend to contain larger numbers of species, and empirically, the relative numbers seem to follow systematic mathematical relationships The species-area relationship is usually constructed for a single type of organism, such as all vascular plants or all species of a specific trophic level within a particular site. Ecologists have proposed a wide range of factors determining the slope and elevation of the species-area relationship.
Genetic diversity, the level of biodiversity, refers to the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species.

Quiz #1
What is Ecology 2 Define an ecological Pyramid 2 What is Niche 1