Center for the Environment

Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. It is a measure of the health of ecosystems, a function of climate and other anthropogenic activities.

One of the major environmental crises facing society today is the grand challenge of the loss of global biodiversity.  We are experiencing an unprecedented rate of extinction of organisms, on a scale only seen in the five major extinction events known to have occurred in all of earth’s history.

The biodiversity interdisciplinary research group at Purdue, brings together faculties with wealth of knowledge and years of field, academic and industrial experience from key research areas such as botany, ecology, evolution, genomics & genetics, microbiology and zoology, in a collaborative effort to continually discover, describe, and maintain inventory of our global diversity. Their findings could be used to assist in allocating limited resources to preserve and protect endangered species, hence providing a sustainable solution to this grand challenge of global biodiversity loss.