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Concept

Biodiversity

Also known as: biological diversity

The variety of life at all levels — genetic diversity within species, species diversity within ecosystems, ecosystem diversity across landscapes, and the diversity of evolutionary lineages and functional roles. Biodiversity is the substrate on which all ecosystem services — pollination, water filtration, soil formation, climate regulation, food production, disease regulation — depend. The current period is characterized by anthropogenic biodiversity loss at a rate comparable to past mass-extinction events; the recognition that this loss is happening on a deep-time-significant scale within decades has reframed conservation, agriculture, and food-systems work across the past four decades. Foundational concept linking ecology, agriculture, food sovereignty, climate science, and the broader question of what kind of biosphere humans will inhabit through the coming centuries.

Scientific

Three integrated levels of biodiversity:

  • [[genetic-diversity|Genetic diversity]] — the variation within species. [[genetic-diversity|Genetic diversity]] within crop species (heritage and landrace varieties), within wild populations, and within domesticated livestock breeds is what allows continued evolutionary adaptation to changing conditions. Loss of genetic diversity makes species vulnerable to disease, climate change, and other stressors.
  • Species diversity — the variety of species within an ecosystem or region. Tropical rainforests have very high species diversity; tundra has lower species diversity; deep ocean has its own distinctive diversity patterns.
  • Ecosystem diversity — the variety of ecological communities across a landscape or region. The U.S. holds desert, grassland, tundra, multiple forest types, wetland, marine, and aquatic ecosystem types.

The current period (the Anthropocene) is characterized by biodiversity loss at a rate that paleobiologists compare to past mass-extinction events: documented species extinctions are running at 100–1,000× background rates; population declines (as documented by the Living Planet Index) show ~70% average decline in monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2020; agricultural biodiversity has collapsed dramatically (75% of global crop varieties cultivated in 1900 are now extinct; ~30% of livestock breeds are at risk of extinction).

Practical

Biodiversity is operationally central to:

  • Agriculture. Heritage seed varieties, [[heritage-breeds|heritage livestock]] breeds, and on-farm plant-and-pollinator diversity all support resilient long-term food production. Monoculture-and-uniformity is biodiversity-destruction; diverse working farms are biodiversity-supporting.
  • [[food-sovereignty|Food sovereignty]]. Local food systems hold local biodiversity (Indigenous-and-regional crop varieties, regional livestock breeds, local-pollinator communities) that global commodity-food systems systematically erase.
  • Climate resilience. Diverse ecosystems are substantially more resilient to climate stress than simplified ones; agricultural diversity is similarly resilient to weather extremes.
  • Public health. Microbiome diversity (a biodiversity-pattern at the human-individual scale) is a substantial determinant of immune function, mental health, and metabolic health. The same diversity-supports-resilience pattern that holds at ecosystem scale holds within the human body.

For 0mn1.one’s [[mission-district-sf|mission]], biodiversity work is integrated with the rest of [[0mn1one|the platform]]‘s mission. The directory’s heritage-seed listings, heritage-breed listings, working farm listings, and Indigenous-and-Black-led food-sovereignty institutional listings are all biodiversity-conservation work — supporting the on-the-ground institutions and people who maintain the diversity that long-term food and ecological health depend on.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Shares substrate with: [[ecosystem-services]]
  • Shares approach with: [[indigenous-foodways]]
  • Counterpart to: [[industrial-agriculture]]

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Scientific

shares approach with

  • Animals the animal layer is a core part of the platform's biodiversity record
  • Places the political/administrative layer over the ecological one
  • Plants the plant layer is most of the platform's biodiversity record by entry count

3 inbound links · 3 outbound