Alberto Basset, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento and Director of the LifeWatch ERIC Service Centre in Lecce, Italy, features in this podcast 'What is Biodiversity', the first of our podcast series focused on biodiversity issues. Starting with the foundation concepts of biology - the science of life, or more operationally, whatever concerns life and living organisms - and diversity, in terms of the diversity of the species, populations collected at a single sampling station, taxonomical diversity, genetic diversity, of species inside an ecosystem, and the diversity of species and ecosystems within a landscape or biogeographical region.  Prof Basset goes on to discuss the infinitesimal probability of what we take for granted, what we observe in nature, actually having developed at all, through natural selection and evolution, over the 3.7 billion years of life on Earth. A development based on random mutations that made certain individuals fitter and more likely to leave progeny than others, so as to produce stable communities, be they of the species or of the landscape. Which places an enormous responsibility on our shoulders, because human activities are now interfering with and changing something that is not intrinsically stable, but the product of 3 billion years of development against the odds. We humans are destroying biodiversity faster than we can quantify how many species actually make up our biosphere. A complex and fragile biodiversity that we should take more care to protect. 

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