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"In a rapidly changing world, six threats to biodiversity can be summarized by the acronym COPHID: Climate change, Overharvesting, Pollution, Habitat loss, Invasive species, and Disease. These threats have led to many extinctions and are on course to generate many more. Each threat can be traced back to the growth of the human population, increase in wealth, and in technology. This textbook is designed to provide the summary of what has happened and why, as well as ask how to predict what will happen under various scenarios. The ecological principles of species interactions-competition, predation and parasitism-are applied to food security and to human disease, demonstrating how simplification of communities threatens both wild species and humans. Dramatic changes in the environment have been brought about by removal of species (including collapse of coral reefs), by addition of species (such as predators destroying island faunas), by pollution (such as the formation of dead zones in the ocean), and by habitat conversion, with about 75% of the world's productive land being exploited for agriculture or forestry. Despite these issues, cause for optimism stems from the increase in wealth, increased education, and an associated decline in the fertility rate. This may eventually lead to a declining human population, as well as more value placed on an increasingly scarce commodity, wildlands."--

Ecology --- Global environmental change --- Biodiversity

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Pure sciences. Natural sciences (general)