Biodiversity

Biodiversity research papers look at the science of diversity in the environment. The environmental issue of biodiversity and the protection of it can be written about in a custom research paper from Paper Masters.

Biodiversity has been defined as the degree of variation in life on Earth. Biodiversity seeks to measure the different number of organisms living in a particular ecosystem. However, biodiversity is not equally spread across the planet, but is in fact greater in the tropics towards the equator, and in the Western Pacific ocean, where warmer sea surface temperatures attract life.

The Science of Diversity

At the present time, scientists estimate that there are between 10 and 14 million different species of life on the planet. This is despite the fact that as much as 99 percent of all species ever to have lived on Earth have gone extinct. Several major instances of mass extinction throughout Earth's history have caused this, with the most recent being the mass extinction event 65 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Conservationist Raymond Dasmann coined the term "biological diversity" in 1968, but it was not until the 1980s when the shortened term "biodiversity" came into popular usage among scientists and the general public. Scientists now recognize four levels of biodiversity on the planet:

1. Taxonomic diversity (the number of species)
2. Ecological diversity (diversity of place)
3. Morphological diversity (diversity in genetics)
4. Molecular diversity

The loss of biodiversity on the planet, linked to climate change, has serious implications for the future of life on Earth.