Why is biodiversity unevenly distributed

Global biodiversity is the measure of biodiversity on planet Earth and is defined as the total variability of life forms. More than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct…. Known species. Habitat loss is the single greatest threat to biodiversity on Earth today and in fact it is the second largest threat to our existence on this planet next to Climate Change. These include water, soil formation and protection, pollution breakdown and absorption, climate stability and recovery from natural disasters.

With the loss of biodiversity we have no access to these natural services. Habitat destruction is a major cause of biodiversity loss. Habitat loss is caused by deforestation, overpopulation, pollution, and global warming. Species that are physically large and those living in forests or oceans are more affected by habitat reduction. Loss of biodiversity affects the ecosystem in many ways. The predators of the lost species, however, will go down in population because its main source of food has disappeared.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Essay What is uneven distribution? Ben Davis May 1, What is uneven distribution? What is uneven distribution of water? What is not evenly distributed across the earth?

Why is biodiversity distributed unevenly? How biodiversity is distributed on Earth? What are three benefits of biodiversity? Can we survive without biodiversity?

What are the social benefits of biodiversity? Does the organism prefer living up in the air or underwater? Does in prefer living in mountains, in deserts, flatlands, or in caves? Physical factors also include things like climate. Temperature and rainfall are two of the things that drive the distributions of organisms.

They can govern where certain lifeforms can live. If we look more closely at temperature, it's not only whether it's hot or cold all the time, like a certain distance from the poles or near the equator, but what the range of the temperatures might be.

It can be very cold at night and very warm during the day, or vary by season. Temperature can change with elevation.

It's gets colder as you go up mountains. Organisms that prefer those different temperature regimes, as we call them, have specific adaptations for that regime. Another thing about these physical factors is that they can be actual barriers to the movement of organisms. They can physically restrict organisms to a particular place. Mountain ranges, even rivers, can be barriers in a terrestrial environment. Some organisms can't cross them.

There're even barriers in the ocean. Fresh water outflow, say, from the Mississippi River, makes a barrier. Different ocean species that like salt water are separated on the east and west sides of the dangerously fresh outflow, at least dangerous to these marine animals, anyway. Or islands. They're isolated by the water around them. A tortoise living in the Galapagos, for example, wouldn't be able to get back to South America or some other land mass without crossing the ocean.

And tortoises are pretty good at floating the ocean, but no one would argue that it's their preferred way of life. So the ocean is a barrier to movements of many terrestrial organisms. We're actually talking here about something called island biogeography, which a lot of scientists love to look at because it provides a laboratory in which to study evolution.

We could study how the barriers change the properties and ranges and distributions of different organisms that are restricted to living on the islands because the ocean, and even large lakes, are such good barriers to dispersal. Let's talk now very briefly about how biotic factors, living factors, influence the distribution of other life. Here's an example. There are places in the ocean that are essentially deserts where there's low productivity, low biomass, low biodiversity.

Without high species richness or large populations of plankton, things like whales are gonna have a hard time. Likewise, on land, no grass, no antelopes. Those are very simple examples of how one type of life can dictate where other kinds of life might have their preferred habitats.

Another great example, going back to the whales, this is one I love, is people think of whales as these sleek things that are going through the water at high speeds, but when you look closely at the front end of a humpback whale, there's an entire little ecosystem living there.

Everything from barnacles to these, well, you can imagine, whales are big so, their lice are big, too. So they have this type of crustacean, these lice, that live in between the barnacles and all over the whale. If you had lice that big, you'd probably notice.

But the whales just seem to deal with it. Basically, the host whale is the preferred habitat for these parasites. The range of the lice is gonna depend on the range of the host. This is manifest in conservation efforts focused on diversity hotspots. The conservation of genetic diversity within an individual species is an important factor in its survival in the face of environmental changes and disease.

Here we show that diversity within species is also distributed unevenly. Using simple genealogical models, we show that genetic distinctiveness has a scale-free power law distribution.