Biodiversity in the Forest System

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As what is mentioned in class, forests are composed of different parts such as trees, plants, soil, water and various kinds of animals. However, simply having those different parts does not mean a forest is running as a system. There must be some connectors connecting every part of forest. As a result, biodiversity, a crucial element ensuring the interconnectivities among different parts of forest are in normal condition, plays an important role in forests.
Biodiversity, generally refers to genetic diversity, species diversity, or ecosystem diversity within an area, including not only trees, but numerous kinds of animals and micro-organism. In a biologically diverse forest, this mechanism allows organisms to adapt to changing environment and to maintain ecosystem functions. If we emphasize the role of biodiversity as a connector, mainly we are discussing about the species diversity.
There are basically four approaches of how biodiversity connects different part in ecosystems. First is the predator-prey relationship. As we all know, predator-prey relationship apply to animals that eat other animals and animals that are eaten by other animals, such as lion and zebra, wolf and rabbit. Plus, the same concept also applies to plants: bear and berry, rabbit and lettuce, grasshopper and leaf. Predators and preys are strongly bonded with each other thus unusual conditions of either of them will resulted in huge effect on the other one. In another word, we do not want to see an imbalance between predators and preys. Furthermore, one of the species will suffer population collapse and the ecosystem will be affected. For example, there are some stories talking about one species, usually carnivorous predators, are being excessively hunted t...

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...t they are extremely important. Without them, dead bodies and waste will accumulate over and over so the earth might be covered with nasty waste. Our planet could in fact become a huge trash yard. Typically, decomposers in ecosystem includes bacteria, fungi and worms. They can either break down organic matters or eat wastes produced by plants and animals using biochemical reactions that convert the prey tissue into metabolically useful chemical products without internal digestion.
All the phenomena above indicates that biodiversity, in other word, the variety of species, is the basis of those interactions among forest ecosystem. Any absence of one species in that huge ecosystem will result in negative effects on other related species. Meanwhile, any absence of the interactions among species will cause the dysfunction of forests and lead to deterioration of forests.

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