Biodiversity is now under severe threat.
But while everyone agrees that the accelerating loss of biodiversity is a tragedy, ecologists have found themselves in something of a dilemma when they try to explain why biodiversity is ecologically important. Sankaran and McNaughton studied how three different types of natural grassland recover from disturbance. Located within a remote tiger reserve in the Western Ghats Mountains of India, these savanna grasslands have been moulded by environmental factors, which include grazing animals and episodic fires that start in the tinder-dry grass. The grasslands differ in their biodiversity. Two of the grasslands were each massively dominated by a single grass species and had relatively low numbers of different plant species, whereas the third contained both of the grasses and was also of higher biodiversity.