Diversity in the Living World

Earth offers an extraordinary range of habitats, and living organisms are found in nearly all of them — from polar ice caps to volcanic hot springs, from shallow coastal lagoons to the deepest ocean trenches, and from tropical rainforests to dry, parched deserts. A species that thrives in one such setting has usually adapted successfully to that ecosystem's specific conditions, an ecosystem being a community of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) factors together with the relationships between them. Wherever a particularly large number of species coexist within one ecosystem, that richness is what is meant by biological diversity, or biodiversity for short. …