Published July 1, 2021, 10:30 AM
The majority of the Earth’s lands are facing a loss of ecological integrity.
Ecological integrity, or the capacity of an ecosystem to naturally protect all the organisms and habitats, can be assessed in three measures of intactness. These are habitat intactness, faunal intactness, and functional intactness.
Image by jplenio from Pixabay.
Habitat intactness is determined by how humans have created changes to the land, while faunal intactness pertains to the set of animal species in a habitat, and functional intactness shows if there is an adequate number of animals that make an ecosystem work.
Andrew Plumptre, the head of the Key Biodiversity Areas Secretariat in the UK, says that only two to three percent of the land on Earth remains the same state, having the same flora and fauna since the pre-industrial times or before major human activities took place.