ABSTRACT

‘Biodiversity’ is one of those modern contractions, like ‘cyberspace’, that has become so familiar, oft-used and well worn that we no longer recognize what it is a contraction of. The term is a shortening of the phrase ‘biological diversity’, and, according to conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, first appeared in a rather obscure US government report authored by Elliot Norse in 1980 (Pimm 2001). Norse was ahead of his time. As a term, the word ‘biodiversity’ did not attain common use in science until after the American National Forum on Biodiversity in 1986 (Thompson and Starzomski 2006) and through Harvard zoologist E.O. Wilson’s extensive use of the term in his own writings, beginning with his book, Biodiversity (Wilson 1988). It has now been defined by a multitude of authors and agencies, but not always consistently. To those engaged in the study of natural history, biodiversity represents the biotic elements of nature that can be described and classified. To environmental activists, biodiversity is an intrinsic value-laden quality of natural systems that should be preserved for its own sake. To ecologists and conservation biologists, biodiversity is a measurable parameter relevant to an understanding of community structure, environmental processes, and ecosystem functions (Mayer 2006). All of these ‘thought styles’ of defining and describing biodiversity are embedded and conflated in the concept of ‘biodiversity hotspots’.