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Biodiversity: Environment

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Synonyms

Biological diversity

Definition/Description

Biodiversity is the shortened form of two words “biological” and “diversity.” Since the Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted at the Rio “Earth Summit” in 1992 (UNCED 1993), biodiversity has been discussed on three dimensions: ecosystems, species, and genes. Ecosystem diversity relates to the variety of habitats, biotic communities, ecological processes, and the diversity within ecosystems. An ecosystem is (UN 1992): “a dynamic complex of plant, animal, and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit.” For a business, an ecosystem perspective focuses on where a company operates within the ecological landscape (IUCN 2002).

Species diversity refers to the variety of species within a region. The “biological species definition” or the “biological species concept” is based on Ernst Mayr’s definition (Mayr 1942): “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural...

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Correspondence to Eila Jeronen .

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Jeronen, E. (2019). Biodiversity: Environment. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_902-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_902-1

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