Species Diversity and Conservation

To effectively conserve biodiversity, scientists need to be able to define what they want to conserve, determine where it currently occurs, identify strategies to help conserve it, and track over time whether or not these strategies are working. Scientists can use organisms that exhibit a great degree of species diversity (difference between different species) to estimate ecosystem biodiversity. This helps scientists identify ecosystems in need of conservation, as well as monitor whether the implemented conservation strategies are working or not.

One such useful organism is the spider. Spiders are useful because they live in almost every one of Earth's biomes, they are easy to catch, and there is a lot of difference between the different species of spiders. Therefore, scientists often use spiders as indicators of environmental change and community level diversity in an ecosystem. Scientists classify and analyze the spider community of ecosystems in order to estimate the biodiversity and health of an ecosystem. Remember, a community is made up of all the populations (single species) that live together in an area: this means that there may be many different species of spiders that make up the spider community in a particular ecosystem.

This classification of a community of any organism has 3 levels:

Level 1: Classifying the species from one location or ecosystem. This helps determine the overall biodiversity of a particular ecosystem.

Level 2: Classifying the species from multiple locations or ecosystems and comparing them. This helps scientists make decisions about which ecosystems to prioritize in their conservation efforts.

Level 3: Identifying the evolutionary relationships between the different species. This is also important when it comes to decision-making because if one ecosystem has evolutionarily unique specimens, this might be the ecosystem that is most important to protect.

The following pages will describe the classification of spider communities in forest ecosystems and its usefulness.



Source: http://cnx.org/content/m12179/latest/ (CC BY)