NEET BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -An ecosystem’s biodiversity has a direct effect on the area’s economy. The decline of a single species in an ecosystem rarely affects the other species living in that ecosystem. Habitat fragmentation is the biggest threat to biodiversity. The first organisms to live in a new habitat are large, slow growing plants.

Detailed explanation-2: -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-3: -Climate change, pollution, poaching, and habitat destruction change the number of plant and animal species that live in a habitat, known as declining biodiversity.

Detailed explanation-4: -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-5: -Biodiversity loss, however, is not just confined to the land. Life in the oceans is being threatened by overfishing, habitat degradation, pollution, and acidification due to rising carbon dioxide levels in the sea water. Corals, for example, have undergone dramatic declines since the mid-1990s.