NEET BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Pollution, climate change, and population growth are all threats to biodiversity. These threats have caused an unprecedented rise in the rate of species extinction. Some scientists estimate that half of all species on Earth will be wiped out within the next century.

Detailed explanation-2: -Declining biodiversity lowers an ecosystem’s productivity (the amount of food energy that is converted into the biomass) and lowers the quality of the ecosystem’s services (which often include maintaining the soil, purifying water that runs through it, and supplying food and shade, etc.).

Detailed explanation-3: -The species that make up an ecosystem are connected in complex ‘food webs’ of eater and eaten. When one species disappears, its predators can no longer eat it and its prey are no longer eaten by it. Changes in these populations affect others. Such impact ‘cascades’ can be unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic.

Detailed explanation-4: -This means that if the species were to disappear from the ecosystem, no other species would be able to fill its ecological niche. The ecosystem would be forced to radically change, allowing new and possibly invasive species to populate the habitat.

Detailed explanation-5: -Biodiversity, or the variety of all living things on our planet, has been declining at an alarming rate in recent years, mainly due to human activities, such as land use changes, pollution and climate change.