Is a low biodiversity more stable than high biodiversity and how the biodiversity can be conserved and how can we reduce biodiversity loss?
Dr. Naresh,
You are asking some profound questions to which there are no obvious answers, but there is information that might allow you to come up with your own answers. Basically this question asks a question similar to that addressed by Bob May in his book Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. The answer May arrived at was that in Model Ecosystems low diversity was generally more stable than high diversity because a more diverse systems was more susceptible to perturbations because of the complexity of the number of links involved in the construction of the model. This idea has received some reinforcement from the idea of Trophic Cascades.
In reality, however, systems with high diversity are probably more stable because species buffer each other through multiple links, e.g. if one species population crashes, it does not crash the system because there are alternate foods and living spaces available that prevent the entire system from falling apart. This idea has been reinforced by the concept of Niche Construction, which argues that species regularly create new environmental conditions and physical habitats where other species can survive and even thrive.
I hope you can see how these concepts can actually complement each other while appearing to arrive at different conclusions. This is one reason that i think that Indigenous ways of thinking can be better than Western approaches, because Indigenous thinking is rooted in process and action rather than in static solutions, such as stability. In reality there is probably no such thing as. a stable system outside of theory, but there are degrees of stability that can be achieved through complex interactions between a wide range of species.
I am attaching some of my work that addresses some aspects of these issues.
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