Fact Pack

As biodiversity disappears, ecosystems become weak and inefficient, threatening the health and maintenance of all life. Today, earth’s biodiversity and its life-sustaining services are being threatened.

Biodiversity Loss

Implications of Not Preserving Biodiversity

Water shortages, landslides, soil erosion, fish kills, and forest fires all result from biodiversity loss. These losses create irreparable economic and ecological damage.

• The United States is now spending an estimated $7.8 billion to restore natural ecological processes in the Florida Everglades, which promises to help restore the health of the region’s biodiversity.(1)
• Only a few decades ago, oysters were capable of keeping the entire Chesapeake Bay clear by filtering out particles at a rate estimated to be the equivalent of the entire volume of the bay, every three days. Over-harvesting has reduced populations by 99%, and the remaining oysters cannot keep up with the filtering process.(2)
• Species decline is often an early warning sign of a health threat to all species, including humans. For example, when bald eagle populations and other birds of prey began to decline due to eggshell thinning caused by DDT, Americans became aware of the health risks of DDT and banned its use before humans experienced significant adverse health affects.

The Reality of Biodiversity Loss

• The Natural Heritage Central Database lists 526 species as extinct or missing and a recent review of the status of all U.S. species by the Nature Conservancy reveals that approximately one-third of U.S. plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.(3)
• In the United States, 37% of freshwater fish species, 67% of mussels, 51% of crayfish, and 40% of amphibians are threatened or have become extinct.(4)
• Ninety-eight percent of America’s grasslands are gone, including 98 percent of the original 58 million hectares of tallgrass prairie in the Midwest and Great Plains.(3)
• Eight-five percent of the virgin forests throughout the U.S. have been destroyed, with losses estimated at 95-98 percent in the lower 48 states. For example, old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest have declined by 90 percent, and longleaf pine, which once dominated the uplands of the southeastern coastal plain, have been reduced by 98 percent.(3)
• Between 90-98% of wild and scenic rivers in the U.S. are degraded.(1)
• Seventy to ninety percent of southern California’s coastal sage scrub, a diverse and rare habitat type hosting many endemic species, has been lost to urban and agricultural expansion.(3)
• Ninety percent of the wading birds that once graced Florida’s Everglades are gone.(3)
• California has lost over 99% of its native grasslands and 85% of its coastal redwoods.(3)
• The Chesapeake Bay has lost 90% of its submerged aquatic vegetation.(3)

If current rates of biodiversity loss continue...

• There are currently more than 6 billion people living on earth, and experts predict the world population will reach 9 billion people in the next 50 years. Incredibly, while the world population has doubled since 1950, the world economy has quintupled, placing greater strain and demand on the world’s fixed supply of resources.
• Based on recent extinction rates, an estimated 4% of freshwater species will be lost in North America each decade, a rate nearly five times that of terrestrial species.(5)
• Destruction of biodiversity will reduce the quality of life for future generations, including psychological, emotional, and spiritual effects from ruined forests, beaches, lakes, mountains, and open spaces.

What Contributes to Biodiversity Loss?

Sprawl

• Habitat loss from development, fragmentation, and degradation is the most significant threat to biodiversity in the U.S. Much of this destruction occurred over a century from farming, logging, grazing, mining, road building, damming, and channelizing of streams. Today, the most immediate threat to habitat is from poorly planned urbanization or sprawl.(3) Each year 2.2 million acres are lost to sprawl.(6)
• Other adverse impacts from sprawl include air and water pollution, erosion of land cleared for development, stream siltation, reduced natural capacity to filter pollutants and detoxify waters, and less capacity to cycle nutrients and compost organic waste.(7)
• Habitat destruction reduces or eliminates populations of a particular species, which, in turn, reduces genetic diversity, leaving the species more vulnerable to disease, disaster, and eradication.
• Although roads, developments, and dams do not destroy a large quantity of habitat outright, they can have an extremely devastating ecological impact on species’ populations. The fragmentation that results divides and creates barriers in natural habitat, leading to the disruption of wildlife movement, dispersal, pollination, and natural processes, like fires and flooding, and drastically reduces the ability of the habitat to support species.
• Channelization and bank stabilization projects on the Missouri River have eliminated the river otter population from this waterway.(8)
• The Willamette River in Oregon lost 80% of riparian forests and shoreline habitats as a result of straightening and deepening the river channel.(8)
• Eighty-three percent of 98 threatened or endangered plant species are threatened primarily by habitat destruction through human activity.(8)

Invasive Species

Invasive species threaten biodiversity, habitat quality, ecosystem function, and produce severe, often irreversible impacts on agriculture, recreation, and our natural resources. They are the second most important threat to native species, behind habitat destruction, having contributed to the decline of 42% of U.S. endangered and threatened species.(9)

• Invasive species cost the United States approximately $137 billion per year. These species affect everything from habitat to natural cycles, like fire cycles and nutrient and water cycling in native ecosystems.(10)
• In 1991, because of reduced carrying capacity from leafy spurge infestations, ranchers and landowners in South Dakota were losing $1.4 million per year. The lost forage would have supported beef herds that could have generated $4.6 million in annual revenues.(11)
• Eurasian watermilfoil was discovered in 11 additional Minnesota water bodies during 2003. There are now 152 Minnesota lakes, rivers, and streams known to contain the exotic submersed aquatic plant.(12)
• In Florida, from 1980-1993, managing the invasive plant hydrilla in public lakes and rivers where it clogs drainage and irrigation canals, prevents navigation, shades out beneficial native plants, degrades water quality, and interferes with hydroelectric plants and urban water supplies, cost $38.5 million; estimates indicate $10 million is actually needed for adequate annual statewide control.(13)
• Invasive species have played a major role in the listing of 35 to 46 percent of all species currently considered endangered or threatened in the United States.(1)

Overexploitation

• Of the 6 billion people on earth, Americans consume more resources per person than any other nation, increasing the demands on our already strained ecosystems and threatening biodiversity.(8)
• The California abalone is one of many fish species on the verge of extinction due to over-harvesting at fisheries.(14)
• Industrial logging damages and destroys many habitats and ecosystems.(8)
• Illegal trade creates a demand for species that are over-hunted, placing them at risk of extinction.(8)

Pollution

• Pollutants weaken immune systems and reproductive capacity, reducing species’ resilience and ability to maintain adequate populations.(15)
• Though now banned in the U.S., high levels of DDT found in marine mammals make it difficult for them to reproduce.(15)
• Toxic chemical buildup in ecosystems, primarily DDT, interfered with bald eagle and other raptor reproduction, and contributed to a serious population decline from 75,000 nesting bald eagles in the lower 48 states in 1782 to only 450 nesting pairs by the 1960s.(16)
• Ozone pollution from the Ohio Valley damages trees in the Appalachian Mountains.(15)

Global Climate Change

• Deforestation and burning fossil fuels increase the concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases which trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, leading to an increase in average yearly temperatures on earth.
• Global warming may lead certain species to expand their ranges, including mosquitoes that carry malaria, encephalitis, and other diseases.(1)
• The anticipated speed of climate changes, coupled with direct loss of natural habitat, may prevent some species from adapting quickly enough, resulting in death and possible extinction.(1)
• Global warming shifts ecosystems and changes migration patterns. The ranges for marine life along the Pacific coast, for example, are shifting northward.(17)

Statewide Biodiversity Information

• Every state has access to biodiversity information through Natural Heritage Programs and Gap Analysis Programs (GAP) that are complete or in progress. Many states are forming additional information collection and assessment agencies as part of their biodiversity policy. Increasingly, state fish and wildlife agency wildlife diversity programs, state departments of natural resources, and even many state universities have information and expertise on their state’s biodiversity.

Economic Value of Biodiversity

• People travel to mountains, coasts, lakes, and forests for vacation and spend millions of dollars on hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting.(1)
• In 1991, people in the U.S. spent $16 billion on sport fishing. This is almost twice what was produced by global commercial harvesting of freshwater fish for consumption in the same year.(1)
• The global estimated value of soil bacterial services provided by natural species is $33 billion a year.(1)