How does biodiversity vary across the biosphere

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content. May 1, thanh. There are too many ways it varies to count. The fact that you use the word biodiversity gives you the answer Water travels across lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere.

There are two components of biodiversity; species richness and species composition. The health of an ecosystem is directly impacted by this richness and composition. Log in. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Economics 20 cards.

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What is monogramous. Economics 27 cards. What often happens when there are attempts to unify groups in places that have culturally traditional governments and deeply rooted tribal and ethnic divisions. What two elements make up authority. Q: How does biodiversity vary across the biosphere? Endemic species—species that are only found in one particular location—are also found in hotspots.

For example, the grass in pastures feeds cattle. Cattle then produce manure that returns nutrients to the soil, which helps to grow more grass. This manure can also be used to fertilize cropland. Many species provide important benefits to humans, including food, clothing, and medicine. 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. Conservation efforts are necessary to preserve biodiversity and protect endangered species and their habitats. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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Roughly a third of these are believed to be at some risk of extinction. Diversity is concentrated in certain areas and is highest in the tropics, in a band around the equator, declining progressively toward the polar regions. Specific places with high overall diversity or high levels of endemism — arrays of species found nowhere else — are often called hotspots and include parts of the southwestern United States and Mexico , Brazil , California , and South Africa , as well as Hawaii, Madagascar, New Zealand , and other islands across the world.

Of course, every intact ecosystem — hotspot or not — is important to preserve, not only because they all provide services, such as clean water and climate moderation, but also because each contains a unique ecological composition and priceless evolutionary information. The Earth's biodiversity is the result of 4 billion years of evolution — change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next.

Up until about million years ago, life consisted of single-celled organisms. The history of biodiversity during the Phanerozoic era the past million years begins with the rapid growth of the Cambrian explosion — the period in which most phyla of multicellular organisms appeared.

Over the next million years, global diversity showed little overall trend and was marked by periodic, massive losses of diversity classified as mass extinction events.

The largest of these occurred about million years ago and is often called the P-Tr or Permian-Triassic extinction event; various mechanisms, ranging from increased volcanic eruptions to a drastic decrease in the air's oxygen, are thought to have contributed to the P-Tr, which killed about 96 percent of all marine species and an estimated 70 percent of land species.

The most recent mass extinction, the K-T event, happened 65 million years ago and ended the reign of the dinosaurs. The causes of previous mass extinctions aren't fully understood, but extinctions tend to occur when long-term stresses like climate change are compounded by sudden shocks.