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Species will be pushed out of their habitat either directly by habitat destruction or indirectly by fragmentation, degradation, or pollution. Any efforts to protect the world's remaining natural habitat and biodiversity will compete directly with humans' growing demand for natural resources, especially new agricultural lands. [56]
Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent.
Beyond the value biodiversity has in regulating and stabilizing ecosystem processes, there are direct economic consequences of losing diversity in certain ecosystems and in the world as a whole. Losing species means losing potential foods, medicines, industrial products, and tourism, all of which have a direct economic effect on peoples lives. [6]
Forests harbour most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world's biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world's forests. [75] 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. [76]
A 2017 World Wildlife Fund study found that 60% of biodiversity loss can be attributed to the vast scale of feed crop cultivation needed to rear tens of billions of farm animals, which puts enormous strain on natural resources, resulting in extensive loss of lands and species.
The framework is designed to address the need to mitigate and adapt to the challenges posed by pollution, climate crisis, and biodiversity loss. The framework is similar to other multidimensional analyses of human impacts on the environment including global catastrophic risk and planetary boundaries .
Inbreeding does not always result in negative fitness consequences, but when inbreeding is associated with fitness reduction it is called inbreeding depression. Inbreeding becomes of increasing concern as the level of homozygosity increases, facilitating the expression of deleterious alleles that reduce the fitness. Habitat fragmentation can ...
There is an ongoing decline in plant biodiversity, just like there is ongoing biodiversity loss for many other life forms. One of the causes for this decline is climate change. [1] [2] [3] Environmental conditions play a key role in defining the function and geographic distributions of plants.