ABSTRACT
Discovering and defining the richness of life is central to our knowledge of biodiversity. This chapter covers:
Biodiversity strikes a Pavlovian nerve, conjuring up images of rare mammals and rainforests but it embraces much more than these. There are three main components to biodiversity: genetic, organismal and ecological. The genetic and subcellular diversity includes all biodiversity expressed within individual cells plus non-cellular organisms such as viruses. The diversity of genetic information is central to this category but the variety of metabolic pathways and molecular biology of life also represent important diversity. Taxonomic diversity is dominated by our focus on species. Species are but one level at which organisms can be classified and the diversity of other categories such as families or phyla provides additional insights. Ecological diversity includes whole communities, habitats and ecosystems, including domestic stocks. Various definitions including UNEP’s Global Biodiversity Assessment have added cultural biodiversity as an explicit concept, human social systems intimately dependent on the ecological system within which they exist. This has created some tensions. In 1996 members of the Makah nation attended the International Whaling Committee meeting to request permission to hunt five grey whales a year, after a seventy-year gap, to help maintain their cultural system. Their request was seized upon by Norway, keen to reopen commercial whaling. Small Norwegian coastal towns that would benefit from commercial whaling were compared to the Makah people. Interaction biodiversity has also been coined to embrace the interactions between species as a fundamentally important factor in natural systems. There are at least eighty-five published definitions of the word and the very success of the term biodiversity, its rise to prominence and increasing breadth of topics have fuelled some dissent, with scientists accused of pushing the term as a technological, even mythic concept, because of its allure for research funding (see Table 3.1).
