Maintaining Biodiversity | Biology for Grade 10 PDF Download

Positive & Negative Human Impact

• The increasing human population and the activities of humans (including waste production, peat bog destruction, deforestation and our contributions to global warming) are causing a reduction in global and ecosystem-level biodiversity
• These activities are considered as negative human interactions with ecosystems
• There are, however, ways in which humans can interact positively with ecosystems

Methods to reduce negative impact on ecosystems & protect biodiversity

There are many conflicting pressures on maintaining biodiversity. Some examples include:

• The cost of programmes:
  • Protecting biodiversity can be very expensive
  • Eg. the land used for field margins could be used by farmers to grow crops and sell them – governments sometimes pay farmers a subsidy to make up for the lost money
  • It costs money to check that programmes designed to maintain biodiversity are actually being followed
• Protecting food security:
  • Land that is protected to maintain biodiversity could instead be used for farming – this can cause conflict in areas where there are food shortages
  • Sometimes organisms seen as a threat by farmers (eg. locusts and wolves) are killed to protect crops and livestock – this can negatively affect food chains / biodiversity and can cause conflict when species that are already under threat due to hunting or habitat loss are involved (eg. lions in parts of Africa)
• The development of society:
  • Increasing amounts of land are required to sustain the increasing human population
  • Eg. land required for new housing developments or for new agricultural land in developing countries
  • This high demand means that land with undisturbed habitats and high biodiversity is increasingly being used for development

Maintaining biodiversity

Scientists and concerned members of the public help maintain biodiversity by:

• breeding programs to help preserve endangered species, like the panda
• protection and development of new endangered habitats, often by making National Parks
• replanting hedgerows because there is higher biodiversity in them than the fields they surround
• reducing deforestation and the release of greenhouse gases
• recycling rather than dumping waste in landfill sites