Key Terms – Biodiversity
- biodiversity
- the variety of a biological system, typically conceived as the number of species, but also applying to genes, biochemistry, and ecosystems
- biodiversity hotspot
- a concept originated by Norman Myers to describe a geographical region with a large number of endemic species and a large percentage of degraded habitat
- bush meat
- a wild-caught animal used as food (typically mammals, birds, and reptiles); usually referring to hunting in the tropics of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Americas
- chemical diversity
- the variety of metabolic compounds in an ecosystem
- chytridiomycosis
- a disease of amphibians caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis; thought to be a major cause of the global amphibian decline
- ecosystem diversity
- the variety of ecosystems
- endemic species
- a species native to one place
- exotic species
- (also, invasive species) a species that has been introduced to an ecosystem in which it did not evolve
- extinction
- the disappearance of a species from Earth; local extinction is the disappearance of a species from a region
- extinction rate
- the number of species becoming extinct over time, sometimes defined as extinctions per million species–years to make numbers manageable (E/MSY)
- genetic diversity
- the variety of genes and alleles in a species or other taxonomic group or ecosystem; the term can refer to allelic diversity or genome-wide diversity
- habitat heterogeneity
- the number of ecological niches
- secondary plant compound
- a compound produced as a byproduct of plant metabolic processes that is typically toxic, but is sequestered by the plant to defend against herbivores
- species-area relationship
- the relationship between area surveyed and number of species encountered; typically measured by incrementally increasing the area of a survey and determining the cumulative numbers of species
- tragedy of the commons
- an economic principle that resources held in common will inevitably be over-exploited
- white-nose syndrome
- a disease of cave-hibernating bats in the eastern United States and Canada associated with the fungus Geomyces destructans