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Biodiversity
Welcome to c/Biodiversity @ Mander.xyz!
A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.
Notice Board
This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.
2023-06-16: We invite our users to contribute resources for the sidebar.
2023-06-15: Looking for mods!
About
Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.
Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...
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Quick Links
Resources
- The Convention on Biological Diversity (UN)
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Maps of the World's Biodiversity
- Ecosystems and Human Well-Being (free e-book)
- Falling Fruit: Map of the Urban Harvest
Bypass Paywalls
- On Ethics 1 2 3 4
- WaybackMachine (archive.org)
- Behind the Overlay Browser Extension
- ladder
- Anna's Archive
- Bypass Paywalls Browser Extension (see readme for Chrome & mobile options.)
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I have to agree that official efforts are insufficient both in speed and scale, so I understand the need for civil society rewildering efforts regardless of law. However I'd like to hear from scientists in the field what should and shouldn't be done, because I am sure that misguided efforts can be destructive too.
Ideally there should be a science-backed civil society guerilla force for rewilding to take the right necessary steps at a time where political action is too motivated by other motives, like protecting various lobbies and financial interests or simply their own asses.
And I am quite fed up with farmers concerns given the huge environmentally destructive force that monoculture and animal farming are to our nature. If our current farming practices are incompatible with wildlife existing, then our farming practices need to change instead of wildlife being pushed to extinction.
Regarding farming, aside from poor farming methods, another sad reality is that a huge number of farmers bought into the cheap fertilizer sludge on the market. The sludge grows well but contains high levels of PFAS (toxic microplastics). Crops have been full of microplastics for decades. The same is true of fields and streams containing local deer and fish populations. If you hunt and eat those animals, you ingest PFAS as well.
In the USA, State and Federal agencies are starting to research the PFAS problem as well as fallout medical effects. Are ingested PFAS a cause for our high rates of cancer or mental health disorders?
As with everything they're starting to ask for funding and nobody's quite sure who's going to pay for it yet.