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Insects make up the vast majority of animal species. [14]Chapman, 2005 and 2009 [9] has attempted to compile perhaps the most comprehensive recent statistics on numbers of extant species, drawing on a range of published and unpublished sources, and has come up with a figure of approximately 1.9 million estimated described taxa, as against possibly a total of between 11 and 12 million ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Forests harbour most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world's biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world's forests. [78] A new method used in 2011, put the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million, of which 2.1 million were estimated to live in the ocean. [79]
Although many diverse species and breeds of animals are currently available for food and agricultural production, there is more work to be done on classifying their risk of extinction: in 2014, 17% of the world's farm animal breeds are at risk of extinction and 58% are of unknown risk status, meaning that the problem may be underestimated. The ...
Biodiversity plays a vital role in the maintenance of human health and a wide variety of products derived from plants, animals, and fungi are used in medicine. Biodiversity acts as a source of medicinal compounds, impacts the provision of ecosystem services that improve health and protect against disease, and as an inspiration for biomedical ...
Deforestation causes many threats to wildlife as it not only causes habitat destruction for the many animals that survive in forests, as more than 80% of the world's species live in forests but also leads to further climate change. [8] Deforestation is a main concern in the tropical forests of the world.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), known informally as the Biodiversity Convention, is a multilateral treaty.The Convention has three main goals: the conservation of biological diversity (or biodiversity); the sustainable use of its components; and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources.