Biodiversity - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Biodiversity” is often defined as the variety of all forms of life, from genes to species, through to the broad scale of ecosystems. "Biodiversity" was coined as a contraction of "biological diversity" in 1985, but the new term arguably has taken on a meaning and import all its own. A symposium in 1986, and the follow-up book BioDiversity (Wilson 1988), edited by biologist E. O. Wilson, heralded the popularity of this concept. Ten years later, Takacs (1996, p.39) described its ascent this way: "in 1988, biodiversity did not appear as a keyword in Biological Abstracts, and biological diversity appeared once. In 1993, biodiversity appeared seventy-two times, and biological diversity nineteen times". Fifteen years further on, it would be hard to count how many times "biodiversity" is used every day by scientists, policy-makers, and others. The global importance of biodiversity now is reflected in the widely accepted target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of loss of biodiversity by the year 2010.

See:

Faith, Daniel P., "Biodiversity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2008/entries/biodiversity/.

This entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy addresses the following topics:

1.    Concepts of Biodiversity
2.    From Species Values to Biodiversity Values
2.1 Species Values and Triage
2.2 Species as Equal Units and SMS
3.    Alternatives to Unit-species
3.1 The Shift from Elements to Processes
3.2 Option Value and Hierarchy of Variation
4.     Integrating Process and Elements Perspectives
5.     Biodiversity and Growth of Knowledge
5.1   Phylogenetic Hypotheses
5.2   Species Hypotheses
5.3   Biodiversity and DNA barcoding
6.     Conclusions
Bibliography