What Is Biodiversity?
Part of Biodiversity and Human Impacts · GCSE GCSE Biology revision
This deep dive covers What Is Biodiversity? within Biodiversity and Human Impacts for GCSE Biology. Topic 5: Biodiversity and Human Impacts on Ecosystems It is section 2 of 16 in this topic. Use this deep dive to connect the idea to the wider topic before moving on to questions and flashcards.
Topic position
Section 2 of 16
Practice
20 questions
Recall
19 flashcards
🔬 What Is Biodiversity?
Biodiversity refers to the variety of all different species of organisms on Earth, or within a particular ecosystem. It has two key dimensions:
- Species richness — the total number of different species present in an area
- Species evenness — how evenly distributed those species are (a habitat with 10 species all equally common is more biodiverse than one dominated by a single species)
A tropical rainforest has extremely high biodiversity — thousands of species of insects, plants, birds, and fungi per square kilometre. A wheat field managed by humans has very low biodiversity — usually a handful of species across a huge area.
Biodiversity matters because ecosystems with more species are more resilient. Think of it like a game of Jenga: the more blocks you remove, the less stable the tower. Remove enough species and the whole ecosystem can collapse.