Medical Xpress covers all medical research advances and health news, Tech Xplore covers the latest engineering, electronics and technology advances, Science X Network offers the most comprehensive sci-tech news coverage on the web. on earth, like plants and animals, the number of species increases markedly toward the equator. The rain forest biome has been noted to have the greatest amount of biodiversity in an ecosystem. K. S. Collins et al. The theory is that in the tropics, there's more room for fine-scale specialization among species—not just birds that eat seeds, but birds that eat only one kind of seed, in one part of the environment (branches high in the forest canopy, for example). Species richness, or biodiversity, increases from the polesto the tropicsfor a wide variety of terrestrial and marine organisms, often referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient(LDG). Most studies just work with shell length and height, "but that's not the whole picture," Collins said. "A lot of the ways of life are still present; you just have to eat every kind of seed, or live anywhere in the canopy," Jablonski said. Such discoveries continue to this day as researchers around the globe work to fill in the sizeable gaps in our inventory of life on Earth. This pattern persists midway into the latitudes, … Global patterns of diversity and threat vary substantially. In 4 seconds, you will be redirected to nwfactionfund.org, the site of the National Wildlife Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization. By extrapolating Red List assessments to the full array of species—known and unknown—a recent United Nations report estimates that a staggering 1 million species worldwide may be threatened with extinction in the coming decades. Worldwide, an extraordinary 63 percent of all cycads, a primitive group of seed plants, are at risk, putting them at the top of the list of threatened life-forms, while 14 percent of bird species face possible extinction. Jablonski believes integrating the two could yield important insights. That's something new about how biodiversity works, he said, and it may have implications for how things will play out as climate change progresses. Many plants and animals follow a pattern, known as a latitudinal gradient, where diversity increases toward the tropics and decreases toward the poles. Most of the India lies near the equator. Yes. Today, we see that climate change is not only broadly impacting our ecosystems but undermining many of our traditional, place-based conservation approaches, especially with species on the move in response to climatic shifts. Many tropical plants and animals evolved to be highly specialized and interdependent. The possible reason could be as follows: Temperature decreases as we move away from the equator towards the poles. Biodiversity can be subdivided into three levels Genetic Diversity. "Now we can put hard numbers on shell form where we just had general impressions before," added co-author Rüdiger Bieler, curator of invertebrate zoology at Chicago's Field Museum and member of UChicago's Committee on Evolutionary Biology. As a general rule, species diversity increases from the poles to the equator, an observation first made in the early 1800s by the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. In general, species diversity decreases as we move away from the equator towards the poles. "This could affect humans in a very real way. This ranks among the broadest and most notable biodiversity … For ex: Butterflies, Roses, Corals etc. The tropics represent a remarkable biodiversity, including plants, birds… This stability has meant species … It is estimated that tropical forests contain more than half the species on Earth. The diversity of species is lowest at the poles and increases toward the equator, with the deserts being obvious exceptions. Scientists like Jablonski—whose research on mollusks has shaped the field—have traditionally researched either a species' form (the shape of an organism's body) or its function (the way it makes a living). In biological terms, this is referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), in which the number of species increases from the poles to the Equator. "For example, we want to know whether the fancy lineages turn over more rapidly over time are more extinction-prone or if they're stable," Collins said. Unfortunately, we know that many of these plants and animals are in decline, with increasing numbers in danger of disappearing altogether. But north of Cape Cod, you don't find those. Odd evolutionary outcomes: green fur, body fat, anything else? There are multiple hypotheses for what lies behind this trend, but the pattern is clear: species richness increases from the poles to the equator.