Biodiversity as a Goal and Driver of Restoration

The diversity of life on Earth, which is the engine of ecosystem functions and the ecosystem services they provide, is the product of a long list of evolutionary and ecological processes that are mostly hidden to the casual observer. A useful and popular analogy for explaining what biodiversity is asks us to imagine looking down at a pond and seeing a variety of bubbles breaking the surface; some bubbles are small, some big, some aggregated with others, and some isolated. We then have to determine what went on under the surface to generate the pattern in bubble distribution and abundance. The bubbles that originated in the sediment probably underwent a considerable amount of change before coming to the surface—some bubbles fused with others, some underwent fission, some got trapped and never reached the surface, some drifted outside our field of view, and some originated elsewhere and drifted into our field of view.

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