No one knows for sure how the disappearance of some bug or flower might later affect trees, or air quality, or human life directly. Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard University scientist, says researchers don't know if the total number of species alive on earth is 10 million or 100 million. Records of stressed ecosystems also demonstrate that the descent can be unpredictably abrupt. The loss of a keystone species is like a drill accidentally striking a powerline. It causes lights to go out all over.
Biological diversity can sound like a complicated concept.
But it's really very simple to understand. It's the number of different kinds of living things and their genetic variability of them. Most forest ecologists and biologists agree that West Virginia hardwood forests are among the most biologically diverse in the world. Mixed, in this instance, means that there are large number of big, dominant trees making up the forest canopy. The mixed mesophytic is found along the moist western side of the Appalachian Plateau in both the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee and in the Alleghenies of West Virginia below 2,500 feet.