In this module, you will complete the following:

• First describe what biodiversity is and its importance to the world (150-250 words)
• Explain how biodiversity directly affects you (150-250 words)

1. Biodiversity is all life and living organisms within a given ecosystem and can be viewed as the entirety of the world or just a small handful of soil and the organisms within that soil. Overall, biodiversity has many different values which can be seen in anthropocentric views as well as ecocentric views. In the world of an anthropocentric mind, one would think that they had to protect their environment because it could be useful to them somehow. In a world of an ecocentric mind, would just like to see the healthiness of the ecosystem’s existence, opposed to it being destroyed -in this case the species or environment is not being looked at as a resource like the mind of an anthropocentric person would think. But why is biodiversity so important? As learned in this module we look at hotspots, which are regions that lose an extreme amount of biodiversity. With biodiversity loss we must be aware of how it can affect the environment in general and then eventually how that affects us as humans later down the road.

2. In Bellefonte, PA, many people go hunting, so in my personal ecosystem I could see something like over harvesting in animals. Usually the amount of animals that are killed during hunting seasons are monitored, however, it is still possible that they are being overharvested which is why the limits of what you can hunt in a day differs from year-to-year. Deforestation due to building more suburbs and city like areas will also affect the area I live in. In the past few years, more housing developments have been built in my area and because of this; farmland and forest have been sacrificed. Most people might just think of forest and farmland being taken away as less plants but those plants are also home to many species, most of which we never see or will be able to see. Lastly, Pollution is a problem everywhere and it mostly comes from the human population using too many resources.