Dr Worm and his colleagues discovered that the more species an ocean region has, the more robustly it seems to cope with overexploitation.
Introducing species from one region of the world into another region has more often ended in tears of sorrow than joy, which is why it is discouraged in guidelines issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
This, in turn, reduced how fast new species evolved in the region to every few million years, the researchers suggest.
Wood species vary from one geographic region to another, since farmers and dairymen used the forests around them to make their barns and silos.
There are over 200 species of butterflies in this region alone.
Moreover, our reliance on so few plants and animal breeds makes human populations that much more vulnerable to climate change: as growing conditions change, the most suitable species, breeds or strains in a given region may likewise change.
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Dr Schulte explained the team decided to carry out the study in order to identify effective indicator species that offered an insight into the health of the region's environment.
The two sub-species of white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) have a population in the region of 20, 000 in South Africa alone.
Home to orangutans, pygmy elephants and clouded leopards, this northeast region in the state of Sabah is a hotspot for rare and endangered species.
They discovered that their discipline had been measuring biodiversity with a very narrow lens: looking, for instance, at habitats only in a particular region of the ocean, or at the rise or decline of a particular species, and usually with respect to benchmarks that had been set just decades earlier.
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