Question 1: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health (20 points)

a) Describe two ways of measuring biodiversity. Explain the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem stability. As part of your explanation, discuss how susceptibility to disease in agricultural crops and in isolated tribal human populations provides evidence that supports this idea. (5 points)

b) Write a hypothesis about the effects of biodiversity on an ecosystem’s reaction to adverse conditions such as drought. (2 points)

c) Design an experiment to test your hypothesis from Part B. Describe the overall investigation to be done, the variables to be changed, the variables to be kept constant, the subjects to be used, the control and experimental conditions to be used, the type of data collected, and how the data will be collected. Explain why these data can be used to justify drawing a conclusion about the validity of the hypothesis. (9 points)

d) Suppose a wildfire wipes out all but a small patch of a forest, creating a bottleneck event for several species of plants in the patch. Describe changes to the biodiversity of the patch and predict the ability of this surviving ecosystem fragment to remain stable over the next few years when insect pests move in. Explain your reasoning. (4 points)

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ANSWER TO QUESTION a Biodiversity is measured by several methods however there are two major ways of measuring biodiversity which include Taxonomic diversity This is always plotted as the taxonomic ri... View the full answer