African Wildlife & Environment Issue 79

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

How do we apportion financial value to broad biodiversity in protected areas in the short and particularly in the long term? It takes hundreds if not thousands of years for a true wilderness area to form and become a fully functioning ecosystem. One of the biggest threats to biodiversity in Africa is the rapid habitat loss due to the expanding human population. Biodiversity conservation has never been as critically important as it is right now. Bryan Havemann THIS IS MINE: BIODIVERSITY OR MINERALS?

Ecosystem services are often just taken for granted because we get them for free, like abundant water, because of a natural catchment area, or the air we breathe due to the plants absorbing carbon dioxide and through photosynthesis producing oxygen. The plants by using both the carbon and the oxygen to construct carbohydrates are the mainstay of all vegetation-eating organisms' survival. Without plants releasing oxygen into the atmosphere for respiration by heterotrophic organisms, there would be a fatal breakdown in the oxygen cycle.

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