Biodiversity is the richness and variety of species and habitats, it is the ‘wealth of wildlife’ that surrounds us. Biodiversity includes the whole range of living things from well known trees, animals and flowering plants to lesser known flies, bugs and beetles, mosses, lichens and fungi. It is concerned with the wide range of habitats on which these animals and plants depend and encompasses the natural genetic variety that occurs within species.
Biodiversity is important because without the wide range of plants and animals around us we would not be able to survive. No life form, however big or small, lives in isolation from other living things. Biodiversity can be found all around us from nature reserves in remote upland areas to our own back gardens, local parks and roadside verges.