Biodiversity in your Backyard

During the next few days I will be publishing extracts of an article written by:
Dr Ed Stam, Ecologist, National Zoological Gardens  
concerning Biodiversity and what we as normal citizen can do to help - even if you live in a City.



You would probably associate the word 'biodiversity' with:

• National Parks 

• The tropics 

• The Great Barrier Reef 

• The Fynbos 

and other well-known biodiversity hotspots. 

By: University of Capetown

 These places are famous for their large numbers of species (i.e. high biodiversity), and protecting them surely contributes largely to biodiversity conservation.

However, this does not mean that the Earth's biodiversity is well protected. 

Currently, protected areas cover about 12% of Earth's land surface (see www.wdpa.org), which is a relatively small proportion of the total. 



This means that many species do not occur in protected areas or are much more abundant outside of those areas.

Furthermore, the network of protected areas consists of several relatively small and isolated snippets of land.

Many populations in these small reserves are not viable in the long run if there is no exchange of individuals with other populations, either from other reserves or from unprotected areas. 

This means that for biodiversity conservation to be effective it is necessary that we also look at unprotected areas including farmland and even urbanised areas. 

In tomorrow's article we will focus on this aspect of Biodiversity.