User:Dayminn/Biodiversity loss

The decline of earthworm populations are said to be due to five reason; soil degradation and destruction of habitat, climate change, biological invasion of nonnative species, poor soil management, and pollutant loading. Factors like tillage practices and intensive land use decimate the soil and plant roots that earthworms use to create their biomass, causing for carbon and nitrogen cycles to be impacted negatively. Knowledge of earthworm species diversity is quite limited as not even 50% of them have been described. More studies upon earthworms and how they provide their ecosystem services must be done in order to gain a better understanding of going about preserving their diversity. With earthworm populations dwindling, this has caused for the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity to take action and promote the restoration and maintenance of the many diverse species of earthworms.

Within the Amazon Rainforest there is an area called Bele´m and it is an area of endemism. In Bele´m 76% of the land has already been stripped of its natural resources, including the trees of the forest. Within the area bird species are strongly affected by the deforestation, due to being put in that situation 56% of the birds are now in danger of going into extinction. With the climate changing as well as their habitat, the population of the birds will continue to decline. Even with protected areas of land, the efficiency in which birds are conserved are low.

Freshwater Species Loss

Freshwater ecosystems ranging from swamps, deltas, to rivers make up to 1% of earths surface. Although making up such little proportion of the earth, freshwater ecosystems are important to freshwater species because these kind of habitats are home to approximately one third of vertebrate species. Freshwater species are beginning to decline at twice the rate of other species such as species located on land and those within the ocean, this rapid loss has already placed 27% of 29,500 dependent on freshwater upon the IUCN Red List. With freshwater species declining so quickly, it is due to the poor systems in place that don't provide any protection to their biodiversity.

With overfishing acting as one of the largest threats to fish biodiversity, there are many methods of which fish are attained. Overfishing can be done through use of longline fishing and bottom trawling. What these methods cause is an issue of bycatch. The problem with bycatch is that there is a lack of reportage done from what species have been caught, a lot of the time an unwanted target is caught they are reported as "mixed fish" or are not reported. Unwanted species caught within bycatch tend to be released, but it's common that fish caught die while in capture or die after being released. With an overexploitation of species being removed from their ecosystem, the trophic level becomes interrupted which in turn disrupts the food web.