Biodiversity Worksheet

1)     What is meant by the word “Biodiversity”

2)     All the named species of living organism in the world are shown in the table below.

 

a)     Which group of organisms has the biggest diversity of species. Why do you think this group of organisms has such a high diversity of species?

b)     The beginning of classification can be traced back past Carl Linnaeus to Aristotle. Given such a long time period what is the likelihood that a survey of the world’s species is now complete or nearly complete? Justify your answer.

3)     Invertebrate Animals

 

a)     Which group within the invertebrates has the biggest diversity of species? Why do you think this group has so many species?

4)     How many species do you think there might be without names? Edward Wilson and a team of taxonomists working in the Peruvian Rainforest looked at all the species of beetle living in one tree. This was repeated with many different species of tree and a large number of endemic species were discovered, to each tree. From his studies he predicted that there might be 30 million species of beetle living in rainforest trees alone. Upper limits of possible species were now extended up to 1 million. Wilson is working in sites of “hyper diversity” These are actually glacial refuges, during the ice ages a great deal of rainforest became temperate – but these regions were thought to have maintained diversity through stability over time (Stability- Time Hypothesis). Evaluate Wilson’s methods

5)     Slapton Ley National Nature Reserve is one of the best-documented sites in the UK in terms of species recording. At this site the British Mycological Society meet annually and have been doing so for a number of decades. Each year new species of fungi are discovered and identified in the reserve area, the list continues to grow. Why do you think the species list is not complete for this single site with such intensive survey?

6)       At the United Nations conference in Kuala Lumpur in February 2004 it was noticed that little improvement in conserving global patterns in Biodiversity had been made. Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said human activities such as logging and overfishing are briskly sending animal and plant species to oblivion. He said that the UN estimates a rate of 60,000 species a year are disappearing. Countries have failed to meet expectations set by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - resulting in a "high scale" of species loss worldwide, but especially in the developing world, he said. A Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki said that the current rate threatens a major global crisis for all of humanity. Evaluate the comments made by Toepfer and Suzuki.