2 Biodiversity Kevin

Biological diversity or biodiversity (the latter term is simply a contraction of the former) is the variety of life, in all of its many manifestations. It is a broad unifying concept, encompassing all forms, levels and combinations of natural variation, at all levels of biological organization (Gaston and Spicer 2004). A rather longer and more formal definition is given in the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD; the definition is provided in Article 2), which states that “‘Biological diversity’ means the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversitywithin species, between species and of ecosystems”. Whichever definition is preferred, one can, for example, speak equally of the biodiversity of some given area or volume (be it large or small) of the land or sea, of the biodiversity of a continent or an ocean basin, or of the biodiversity of the entire Earth. Likewise, one can speak of biodiversity at present, at a given time or period in the past or in the future, or over the entire history of life on Earth. The scale of the variety of life is difficult, and perhaps impossible, for any of us truly to visualize or comprehend. In this chapter I first attempt to give some sense of the magnitude of biodiversity by distinguishing between different key elements and what is known about their variation. Second, I consider how the variety of life has changed through time, and third and finally how it varies in space. In short, the chapter will, inevitably in highly summarized form, address the three key issues of how much biodiversity there is, how it arose, and where it can be found.