Biodiversity contains several dimensions Hans-Joachim Schneider/Alamy
At first blush, the idea of biodiversity seems simple enough. It is essentially the variety of all life on Earth. But making sense of biodiversity in a way that can help us halt or even reverse its decline is anything but straightforward.
“People often use the word biodiversity just to mean any characteristic of life out there that we might care to protect,” says , a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. “That’s not a definition I find useful in science because if it’s everything, it’s nothing.”
