Three dimensions of biodiversity: New perspectives and methods

Abstract Although the knowledge and understanding of biodiversity is rapidly increasing, very little of the total biodiversity is currently considered in applied conservation actions. In this sense, it is crucial to integrate independent fields of biodiversity models and perspectives with conservation issues, in particular, the views that address the links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, species interaction, and focal charismatic species. This study overcomes the lack of framework necessary for this integration, and proposes three perspectives and approaches to assess biodiversity. The first perspective is biodiversity potential. It considers the correlation between renewable resources in local ecosystems and biodiversity potential, in terms of the possibility of maintaining a high degree of biodiversity. The energy cost is evaluated using both static and dynamic methods, based on the measure of the emergy of local renewable resources and of the total emergy throughput needed by components in ecosystem food webs, respectively, also highlighting the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services, species interactions via energy transfer respectively. The second perspective considers the contribution of biodiversity to human well-being, such as domestication. In this approach, we assess the contribution of biodiversity to humans by calculating the emergy of non-renewable resources required to domesticate animals or plants into agricultural products. The third perspective highlights the significance of local focal charismatic species to global biodiversity conservation. Taking rare species as an example, the emergy required to maintain rare species per unit area is used as a quantitative indicator of the role of local rare species in maintaining global biodiversity. By measuring biodiversity from these three perspectives (potential, contribution and significance) simultaneously, biodiversity conservation strategies are addressed for different regions. Taking China as a case study, it shows that the provinces featuring high potential, low contribution and low significance can moderately increase biodiversity development. The provinces with high significance to global biodiversity should strengthen conservation to halt biodiversity loss. The areas exhibiting overexploitation of biodiversity should in turn restrict biodiversity exploitation. The general approaches proposed in this study could be applied to different cases, situations and species, promoting the integration to biodiversity conservation actions at different scales.