What is biodiversity?

Simply put, it's the variety of life. More broadly, biodiversity is our collective life support system.

Ontario's Biodiversity Strategy (OBS) adopts the definition of biodiversity that is used in the Canadian Biodiversity Strategy and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity:

“Biodiversity is the variability among living organisms from all sources, including inter alia [among other things], terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.”

The key points of the above definition are:

biodiversity is scalable — that is it exists on many levels, eg. the genes within populations, the populations within species, the species within ecosystems, the ecosystems within landscapes, the landscapes within bioregions, and so on. biodiversity is a key element of ecosystems — without the connections biodiversity creates, ecosystems fall apart. The first challenge to protecting biodiversity is understanding what it means and then, why you should care about it.

Photography
Green earth globe from iStockPhoto.com