Here is a representation done by the American Museum of Natural History depicting the percentage of creatures by their biological affiliations and their mass on earth.

From the adjacent drawing it becomes obvious that humans are just a minor member of this living assemblage.

Consider that insects account for over half of the creatures on earth by weight and variety of species. Among insects the vast majority by weight and the most diverse group on earth are beetle's; the coleopterans.

In addition to the dependence of large obvious animals like elephants, lions and pandas on the smaller creatures, the insects, crustaceans and arachnids are dependent on fungi, algae, protoctists, plants and bacteria. The whole concept of biological diversity refers to the capacity of the worlds creatures to sustain other creatures because of their productivity. Without such diversity there would be no agriculture, no pollination of crops and groves, no civilization.

The loss of biotic diversity.

So what is biological diversity?

This flywheel that drives the productive potential of the living world?

Biological Diversity is the product of the dynamics of energy flow and nutrient cycling in ecosystems.

“The most widely used definition of biological diversity includes three levels: genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity. Deforestation reduces diversity at all three levels.” (67)

According to the United Nation’s World Conservation Strategy and the National Research Council, the loss of biological diversity is an indicator of the ecological health of the planet from which the economic development of all nations ultimately derives.

Seeing and acting on such an interdependent relation among atmospheric warming, biological diversity loss, and human social well-being is the larger goal of ecological problem solving. The method of ecological science.

"Most of the old-growth forest has been cut. Only about 17% of the original old-growth Douglas fir forest of the Pacific Northwest remains, the bulk of this being in United States National Forests." [public land]
Seven species of evolutionarily rare species, other than the northern spotted owl, exist because the conditions of the old-growth forests nourish their existence.

$4 billion dollars worth of timber is at stake as 3000 remaining breeding pairs of spotted owls remain affecting 800 to 2500 hectares of habitat per pair. ($8 million per pair) Timber leases are subsidies to lumber companies since the purchase price of the lease is less than the cost of maintaining the forest!

Global hotspots where biological diversity is under assault and declining.

"This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms -- folded them into its genes and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady." (15)

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the greatest bank of biological differences lies in the tropical rain forests

more than 60% of the diversity of rain forests exists in the canopy above the floor

About twenty places on earth are characterized by a rapidly growing human population in close proximity to nurseries of creatures with a high degree of species richness, or extremely varied habitats, or sources of genetic variability. These genetic hearths are where we derived many of our domesticated crops and animals.

There are three kinds of biological diversity:

Biodiversity is due to: 1) habitat differences, 2) species richness, 3) genetic variety

• Genetic:
  
• the different strains of DNA are an insurance against a blight, disease, or ecological change that might threaten the species. Florida panthers & African Cheetahs are not.
  

• Species:
  
• the varieties are sufficiently different from one another in function, life cycle, or zone of exploitation such as beetles.

• Habitat:
  
• the conditions of substrate, slope, temperature, pressure, altitude, moisture, radiation exposure, and nutrient availability varies from place to place.

Genetic diversity,

Species diversity,

The relative abundance of species may be influenced by availability of resources, or competitive interaction.

Sometimes called "species richness."

Three measures of diversity:

"This failure to understand the production and maintenance of species numbers suggests that ecologists might phrase the problem of diversity better in terms of the factors that influence speciation, competitive ability, and degree of specialization which, after all, determine the number of species that can coexist in a community."

"Observed species abundance distributions apparently stem from the complex structure of natural communities which causes their organization to assume a superficial element of randomness" [ Ricklefs, p. 740]

Importance of biotic diversity:

Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University, biologist

The Diversity of Life: (1992)

“Great biological diversity takes long stretches of geological time and the accumulation of large reservoirs of unique genes. The richest ecosystems build slowly, over millions of years. It is further true that by chance alone only a few new species are poised to move into novel adaptive zones, to create something spectacular and stretch the limits of diversity. A panda or sequoia represents a magnitude of evolution that comes along only rarely. It takes a stroke of luck and a long period of probing, experimentation, and failure. Such a creation is part of deep history, and the planet does not have the means nor the time to see it repeated.”

“I can not imagine a scientific problem of greater importance for humanity.” than the loss of biodiversity.

Biodiversity is our most valuable but least understood and most under appreciated asset.

"Its potential is brilliantly illustrated by the maize species Zea diploperennis, a wild relative of corn discovered in the 1970s by a Mexican College student in the west central state of Jalisco, south or Guadalajara."

The new species is resistant to diseases and unique among living forms of maize in possessing perennial growth.

"The Jalisco maize was found just in time, however. Occupying no more than 10 hectares (25 acres) of mountain land, it was only a week away from extinction by machete and fire."

must be struck to assure biotic diversity in maintained.

"The problem of collective meaning and purpose is both urgent and immediate because, if for no other reason, it determines the environmental ethic. Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself."

"we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering the earth's climate…"

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Problem solving is an opportunity to use critical thinking that is necessary to understand effective means to forestall loss of biotic diversity. Critical thinking and problem solving should in the end instill in its users an “ecological imagination” in which one solution brings into being another solution and so on in an interlocking array of “mutual dependencies.”

One outcome of ecological problem solving is to imagine several opportunities to enhance complementary values in a single solution to a perplexing situation where conflict would otherwise destroy the viability of essential ecological services.