What is biodiversity?
Doug Landis, Project Area Leader: First of all, biodiversity just means all the life around us.
The plants, the insects, the birds, the microbes, the entirety of life that exists in a particular area, we say is the biodiversity of that area.
There are many values that that biodiversity brings.
We tend to characterize those in terms of what they mean for humans, and we call those ecosystem services.
One of the values of biodiversity is that it basically supports all life on earth.
Without microbes recycling nutrients, ecosystems could not continue to exist, and the earth as we know it would not exist.
There are other important regulating services.
Having a diversity of organisms in a habitat, or in an ecosystem, regulates that ecosystem in important ways.
There are provisioning services - the things that we harvest from nature.
The food, the fuel, the fiber: these are provisioning services.
Finally, there are cultural services that biodiversity provides.
People appreciate a beautiful bird.
People ascribe religious or spiritual values to certain types of landscapes.
They harvest materials from those landscapes that may be culturally important to them.
The supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services that biodiversity provides, really have infinite value.
Specifically, in terms of bioenergy, we're interested in harvesting a certain portion of this biodiversity in the form of bioenergy crops, to create this energy stream for us.
We're interesting in doing it in a way that supports all of these other types of ecosystem services,
and I think there are real ways of doing that.
A specific example of the way that biodiversity in an agricultural landscape is critically important
is two things that insects do: pollination and pest suppression.
Without insects conducting pollination, we really would not have the food crops available.
The food crops would not be pollinated, and they would not be available to us.
It's estimated that one-third of the food that we eat every day is insect-pollinated.
It's a critical service. We really couldn't hardly live without it.
Pest regulation - most insects don't become pests in agricultural systems.
A few do, but most insect species exist because they are being controlled by predators and parasites that suppress their populations.
These services are valued at 7.6 billion dollars per year for U.S. agriculture.
In fact, if we had to replace those services with things that humans do, those numbers might even be underestimates.
For more information: GLBRC.org, twitter.com/GLBioenergy, facebook.com/GLBioenergy