biodiversity

Biodiversity or biological diversity is, according to the International Convention on Biological Diversity, the term by which refers to the wide variety of life on Earth and the natural patterns that form, result of billions of years of evolution natural processes as well as the increasing influence of human activities. Biodiversity also includes the variety of ecosystems and genetic differences within each species that allow the combination of multiple forms of life, and whose mutual interactions with the rest of the environment underlying the sustenance of life on the planet.

The Earth Summit held by the UN in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 recognized the global need to reconcile the future preservation of biodiversity to human progress as sustainability or sustainability criteria promulgated in the International Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted in Nairobi on May 22, 1992, date later declared by the UN General Assembly as the International Day of Biodiversity. With the same intention, the year 2010 was declared the International Year of Biodiversity by the 61st session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2006, coinciding with the date of the 2010 Biodiversity Target

Origin and evolution of the term According to the SAR, the term biodiversity

defines "variety of plant and animal species in their environment" 3

However, the concept, by its intuitive nature, presented some difficulties for its precise definition, as noted Fermin Martin Piera4 to argue that abuse could use empty of content, and in their words often happens in the history of thought that new paradigms coexist for a while with the old ideas, along with other authors consider that the concept of biodiversity was already targeted by the very theory of evolution.

In the early twentieth century, ecologists and Gleason Jaccard proposed in various publications for the first statistical indices to compare the internal diversity of ecosystems. A mid-twentieth century, the growing scientific interest led to the development of the concept to describe the complexity and organization, until in 1980, Thomas Lovejoy proposed diversity expression biológica.

biodiversity

Biodiversity is now found on Earth is the result of four billion years of evolución.6

Although the origin of life can not be dated accurately, evidence suggests that started very early, about 100 million years after the formation of the Earth. [Citation needed] Until about 600 million years, life consisted of bacteria and microorganisms. [citation needed]

The history of biodiversity during the Phanerozoic-last 540 million years, starts with rapid growth during the Cambrian explosion, a period during which first appeared phyla of multicellular organisms. [Citation needed] During the next 400 million global biodiversity years showed a relative improvement, but was marked by mass extinctions specific events. [citation needed]