BIO 2031 Biodiversity is the stuff of life. Its rich variety, microbe to marsupial, expressed in the tiniest drop of pond water to the entire biosphere, is central to human sustenance, experience, and enterprise.
Biodiversity enriches our lives - intellectually, aesthetically, economically, and culturally.
Surprisingly, we probably know more about the surface details of equatorial Mars than the richness of life contained in our own backyard. As we reach the end of the millennium, when humanity has come to dominate almost all ecosystems, biodiversity is in crisis, perhaps of magnitude approaching the great episodic extinctions of geological history. This course explores the meaning of biodiversity - how it arose, where it occurs, what is happening to it, and why it is of value. It concludes with a brief introduction to the means for sustaining biodiversity, which is the central topic of Conservation Biology.