Читать книгу Fundamentals of Conservation Biology - Malcolm L. Hunter Jr. - Страница 40

Imagine flocks of parrots flashing green and gold over the piedmont forests of Virginia, a raft of penguin‐like birds paddling up a Norwegian fjord, or a marsupial wolf coursing kangaroos through the eucalypt woodlands of Australia. We will never see these sights because the Carolina parakeet, great auk, and thylacine are gone. And they are not alone. Almost 900 species are known to have been driven into extinction by people just since 1600 (www.IUCNredlist.org), and we can only guess at the total number of species that have disappeared because of human activities. Nothing highlights the need for maintaining biodiversity like the fate of these species and the many more that still survive yet are sliding toward extinction. Keeping the wave of species extinctions from becoming a flood is at the core of conservation biology.

In this chapter we first address two fundamental questions: what is a species and how many species are there? Then we ask, why do they matter? To this end, we explore the importance of species diversity in terms of both intrinsic and instrumental values.