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Biodiversity & Conservation Cheat Sheet
A printable reference covering biodiversity levels, ecosystem services, threats, conservation strategies, protected areas, and biodiversity indexes for grades 6-12.
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Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth, from genes and species to entire ecosystems. This cheat sheet helps students connect biodiversity to ecosystem health, human needs, and environmental decision-making. It is useful for reviewing conservation biology, endangered species, habitat loss, and sustainability. Students need these ideas to understand how human actions can protect or reduce the stability of natural systems. The most important concepts include genetic diversity, species diversity, ecosystem diversity, ecosystem services, and the major causes of biodiversity loss. Students should recognize that high biodiversity usually increases resilience, which helps ecosystems recover from disturbance. Key conservation strategies include protecting habitats, restoring damaged ecosystems, reducing pollution, controlling invasive species, and using resources sustainably. Simple measurements such as species richness, species evenness, and biodiversity indexes help scientists compare ecosystems.
Key Facts
- Biodiversity includes genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity.
- Species richness is the number of different species in an area.
- Species evenness describes how evenly individuals are distributed among the species in a community.
- A simple biodiversity index can be estimated as biodiversity index = number of species / total number of individuals.
- The main threats to biodiversity are habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, population growth, overharvesting, and climate change.
- Ecosystem services include provisioning services such as food and water, regulating services such as climate control, supporting services such as nutrient cycling, and cultural services such as recreation.
- Conservation can be in situ, which protects species in their natural habitats, or ex situ, which protects species outside their natural habitats.
- The IUCN conservation status scale includes categories such as least concern, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild, and extinct.
Vocabulary
- Biodiversity
- Biodiversity is the variety of living things in an area, including variation in genes, species, and ecosystems.
- Ecosystem service
- An ecosystem service is a benefit that humans receive from nature, such as clean water, pollination, soil formation, or flood control.
- Endangered species
- An endangered species is a species that is at high risk of becoming extinct in the near future.
- Invasive species
- An invasive species is a nonnative organism that spreads in a new area and causes harm to native species, ecosystems, or human activities.
- Habitat fragmentation
- Habitat fragmentation is the breaking of a large habitat into smaller, isolated patches, often because of roads, farms, or development.
- Conservation
- Conservation is the protection, management, and restoration of natural resources and biodiversity.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Confusing species richness with species evenness is wrong because richness counts how many species are present, while evenness describes how balanced their populations are.
- Assuming a large population always means high biodiversity is wrong because biodiversity depends on the variety of species and their distribution, not only the total number of organisms.
- Thinking all nonnative species are invasive is wrong because a species is invasive only when it spreads and causes ecological, economic, or health harm.
- Ignoring habitat fragmentation is wrong because small isolated habitat patches can reduce breeding opportunities, limit food access, and increase extinction risk.
- Focusing only on endangered animals is wrong because conservation also protects plants, fungi, microbes, habitats, ecosystem services, and genetic diversity.
Practice Questions
- 1 A forest survey finds 8 species and 200 total individual organisms. Using biodiversity index = number of species / total number of individuals, what is the biodiversity index?
- 2 Two ponds each have 100 organisms. Pond A has 5 species with 20 organisms in each species. Pond B has 5 species, but one species has 80 organisms and the other four have 5 each. Which pond has greater species evenness?
- 3 A grassland had 30 native plant species before development. After a road and housing project, only 18 native plant species remain. How many native plant species were lost?
- 4 Why can protecting one large connected habitat be more effective for biodiversity than protecting several small isolated habitat patches?