The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro defined biodiversity as:
The variability among living organisms from all sources, including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part: this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems
This is in fact the closest we come to a single legally accepted definition of biodiversity, since it is the definition adopted by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The parties to this convention include all the countries on Earth with the exception of Andorra, Brunei Darussalam, the Holy See, Iraq, Somalia, Timor-Leste, and the United States of America.
If the gene is the fundamental unit of natural selection, thus of evolution, some, like E.O. Wilson, say that the real biodiversity is the genetic diversity. However, the species diversity is the easiest one to study.
For geneticists, biodiversity is the diversity of genes and organisms. They study processes such as mutations, gene exchanges, and genome dynamics that occur at the DNA level and generate evolution. For biologists, biodiversity is the diversity of populations of organisms and species, but also the way these organisms function. Organisms appear and disappear; sites are colonized by organisms of the same species or by another. Some species develop social organisations to improve their reproduction goals or use neighbor species that live in communities. Depending on their environment, organisms do not invariably use the same strategies of reproduction.
For ecologists, biodiversity is also the diversity of durable interactions among species. It not only applies to species, but also to their immediate environment (biotope) and the ecoregions the organisms live in. In each ecosystem, living organisms are part of a whole, they interact with one another, but also with the air, water, and soil that surround them.
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