Abstract

Esther Ballesteros
Environmental Science
Research Abstract




Biodiversity is all of the different living organisms in this world; this includes every animal and plant species. . Biodiversity is important to life because it makes up the structure of ecosystems and habitats that provide essential living resources for humans such as food, shelter, and medicine. The different species in the ecosystems help sustain human life; we depend on the biodiversity in this world in order to live. Biodiversity is, and will continue to dwindle due to human impacts, deforestation, and climate change.
I really liked this topic because I care about the biodiversity in this world, most importantly because we are apart of it and yet we are destroying it. In my research I found that for the past 10,000 years man has had the greatest factor affecting biodiversity. Human population growth is something that affect biodiversity a lot because, there are a lot of humans and we get a lot of our resources from biodiversity.I found that Humans currently appropriate ~ 40% of the production of terrestrial ecosystems and ~ 60% of usable freshwaters, have doubled terrestrial nitrogen supply and phosphorus liberation, have manufactured and released globally significant quantities of pesticides, and have initiated a major extinction event. Some other things that show human impact would be; habitat removal, habitat fragmentation, overharvesting, overexploitation, and deforestation. These forests are cut down either for space or for the use of wood as a resource. Climate change becomes a problem when the trees are cut down, because trees are carbon sinks and when they are cut down CO2 is released into the atmosphere and eventually it is part of the process of global warming which causes climate change. The different species cannot adapt to these drastic changes and they start to die.
If something is not done about all of this I think in the future we cannot expect very little biodiversity. That will definitely affect us because we live off of it and we are part of it.



PULL QUOTE
"Humans currently appropriate ~ 40% of the production of terrestrial ecosystems and ~ 60% of usable freshwaters, have doubled terrestrial nitrogen supply and phosphorus liberation, have manufactured and released globally significant quantities of pesticides, and have
initiated a major extinction event.”