Monitoring and maintaining the environment - OCR Gateway Maintaining biodiversity

Human interaction within ecosystems can have both positive and negative impacts on the levels of biodiversity. The increase in the human population and waste it produces, deforestation, peat bog destruction and global warming are all reducing biodiversity. Conservation, the preservation of ecosystems and the organisms within them, helps reverse this.

Scientists and concerned members of the public help maintain biodiversity by:

• introducing breeding programs to help preserve endangered species, like the panda
• protection and development of new endangered habitats, often by making National Parks
• replanting hedgerows because there is higher biodiversity in them than the fields they surround
• reducing deforestation and the release of greenhouse gases
• recycling rather than dumping waste in landfill sites