India has a long tradition of breeding domestic animals for specific qualities. These include cattle, goats, pigs and sheep as well as horses and pigeons. With the focus on increasing milk yields through cross breeding some of the cattle breeds are in damage of beefing extract efforts for the maintenance of pure breeds of native animals need to be strengthened.
A good deal of attention has been paid to the genetic conservation values of domesticated plants, however, in the case of cattle, hybrid varieties of crops are rapidly replacing the land races out of estimated 50,000 varieties of rice in India the country may be dependent on just 300 in the next decades.
Numerous locally adopted varieties which performed well under low or no input conditions are being replaced by a few yielding strains depending on large quantities of inputs. Such replacement, presents the damage of the spreads of serious disease capable of wiping out entire crops.
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Within a species there are often found a number of varieties or races strains which slightly differ each other in one, two a number of characters such as shape, size, quality of their products resistant to insects, pests and diseases, ability to with-stand adverse conditions of environment etc. Such differences are due it slight variation in their genetic organization. This kind of diversity in the genetic makeup of a species is called genetic diversity.
The biotic component in an ecosystem may be composed of a few species only or a large number of species of plants animals and microbes, which react and interact with each other and with abiotic factors of the environment. The richness of species in an ecosystem is usually referred to as species diversity.
Species diversity by itself is not, so informative because the term is relative. However, it is the geographical pattern in species diversity seen in our biosphere which signifies the factors contributing to diversity. One of the most noticeable patterns is that species diversity on earth is maximum in the tropics decreases progressively towards the polar areas. Species diversity is more on continents then on islands at the same latitudes. Besides peasants the latitudinal trends it is seen that species diversity is less in high altitude ecosystem.
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The rich variety of flora and fauna is a part of our natural heritage. We have to ensure that human activities do not harm this great diversity and leave a poorer biosphere for the next generation one way is to monitor the species diversity of ecosystem that are subjected to pollution and deforestation. Like energy transfer for productivity, species diversity of a community is also a measure of health and well being.
All the ecosystem are under pressure. Besides aquaculture industries and large scale falling for wood, forest has been under pressure from river valley projects, irrigation and mining. The pressure is particularly high as most mineral wealth and some of the best sides for water impoundment lie in areas which have high biodiversity replacement of natural forests by plantation of teak, eucalyptus have Clive molting to steam this loss of biodiversity. In the desert and semiarid areas where vegetation relatively spares, requirements of fodder and of fuel wood have led to loss of vegetation. While there is pressure on all ecosystems the more fragile once such as mangroves, and wetlands are particularly vulnerable to human activity.
Depending largely upon the availability of abiotic resources and conditions of the environment and ecosystem develops its own characteristic community of living organisms. A small pond for example constitutes and ecosystem and possesses a set of flora and fauna different from a river which is another type of ecosystem. Different types of forests, grasslands, lakes, ponds, rivers, wetlands etc. represent diverse ecosystem each with a characteristics biotic community.
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On a wider scale ecosystem diversity includes variation in the biological communities in which species live, the ecosystem in which communities exist and the interactions among these levels.