Maintaining Biodiversity

Humans get food and natural resources like wood, rock and water from ecosystems.

I see plants, insects, squirrels, deer, turkey, and people.

A keystone species is a plant or animal that has a big effect on an ecosystem, and they are important to ecosystems because they are needed to keep the ecosystem healthy.

We can find out what animals in the ecosystem eat, and we can use it to trace matter cycling and energy flow.

I think algae and other things like plankton get their energy from the Sun.

We can measure the health of an ecosystem by looking at what is living there. Healthy ecosystems usually have different kinds of plants and animals living there.

Biodiversity in an ecosystem is important because it helps an ecosystem stay healthy.

A sea star is an example of a keystone species, and without it the ecosystem can collapse, like the tide pool example from the video.

Food webs are models of the interactions that happen between the organisms found in the ecosystem. They can be used to explain how matter cycles and energy flows, and it is useful in making predictions about the food resources needed to maintain biodiversity in the ecosystem.

Humans rely on ecosystem biodiversity for things like food, energy, and medicine. For example, humans rely on pollinators like bees to pollinate the crops of food we eat. Without insects, like bees, we wouldn’t have the food we need.

Some humans have jobs that set up areas that protect ecosystems. These protected lands limit human interaction to protect the biodiversity in ecosystems. In the United States, national parks are places that are protected.

Bioindicators, like frogs, are living things that let humans know when something might be wrong in an ecosystem. Bioindicators are important because without them, we might not know something needs to be fixed.