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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.
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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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- 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
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I'm extremely interested in the utility of clover as a ground covering nitrogen affixer, because it could also be a companion plant with the typical crops and grains we already grow. Covering a field of corn with clover would likely only benefit the corn's productivity!
Won't happen because we don't have Roundup Ready^TM^ clover.
If you mow your lawn ,set up your cutting tools to maximum height and a lot of flowers will sprouts, particularly clover! Then you might fight with bee and various insect in order to find the perfect time to mow... good luck ๐
I feel like herbicide resistant clover would be a nightmare. The stuff already spreads itself everywhere
I fail to see the problem ๐
This year I built a vegetable garden and purposely seeded the top soil with clover. The garden has become more wild and "overgrown" looking but I think it adds a bit more wild beauty to it. There's a list of reasons why I chose to add clover as ground cover including:
Something important that modern agriculture seems to overlook is soil health. Healthy soil is alive with microfauna and microfauna is diverse and complicated like any other ecosystem. The soil will be more like a desert without ground cover because there's no safe places for all the tiny life that gets easily overlooked. I even added some large stones and stepping stones because insects love hiding under things like that. My goal is to promote enough life to ensure a healthy, living soil that won't rely heavily on outsourced fertilizers. Composting would be a great compliment to my garden if I got off my ass and built one.
Modern agriculture and farming/gardening practices rely too heavily on outsourced fertilizers and seems to disregard soil health altogether. It's quite sad to see how damaging and nutrient draining monoculture crops are to our precious top soil.
The whole idea of using clover as ground cover is a mix of knowledge from indigenous histories, my bioactive terrariums I have as a hobby and other random bits of knowledge gathered from the internet over the years. This is the first year I've tried using clover as ground cover so I have yet to see how effective it all is but it's a beautiful experiment in progress at least. Since I added fresh compost and horse manure this year, everything is growing great so I won't be able to properly assess things until next year or the year after but I look forward to it.