The Importance of BIODIVERSITY within an Ecosystem 🌿

TERMINOLOGY TUESDAY 🌿
w/ the Florida Native Plant Society!
Terminology Tuesday features weekly short videos teaching you botanical vocabulary (and now ecological terms) to help you get to know and understand our Florida flora.
Biodiversity is essential to the stability, resilience, and, in fact, the very existence of most ecosystems.
Each species has an ecological role within the ecosystem in which it evolved. A species cannot exist alone - the existence of any species (including humans) is interwoven and interdependent with the environment and the relationships with other species in its habitat.
Redundancy refers to many species performing the same role, which is increasingly important in stressful times. If one pollinator is lost, others may remain to perform the same role.
As we lose species at an alarming rate, the relative importance of the remaining species within an ecosystem increases. The Jenga Hypothesis in ecology describes this phenomenon by imagining each block in the game of Jenga as a species and the tower of blocks as the ecosystem that the species upholds. An ecosystem can lose species (blocks) and still continue to function due to redundancy (many species/blocks performing the same roles). There is a tipping point, however, when too many species/blocks are lost, and the ecosystem/tower collapses.
The Florida Native Plant Society helps to advocate for and conserve Florida’s biodiversity, and we are currently fundraising for our Annual Campaign. If you have the means to support our work, please check our FNPS.org to donate!
Thanks for tuning in!
We will be back in the new year to continue learning about biodiversity 👋🏻
#terminologytuesday #terminology #botany #nativeplants #ecology #plantfacts #scicomm #education #environmentaleducation #floridanativeplantsociety #biodiveristy #biodiversitycrisis #ecosystems #jengahypothesis#naturalcommunities #populations

[@dorie991]

Thank you for these!

[@Dman9fp]

Great series. If allowed, I vote for quick videos on 'invasive species', 'monoculture', & 'eutrophication' (Even though of course they are all deserving of deep dive study or lectures too)

[@floridanativeplantsociety]

Noted! Thank you!