La biodiversité : un nouveau regard sur la diversité du vivant

Abstract

The successful emergence of the term "biodiversity" expresses several recent changes in our perception and understanding of the diversity of living organisms. In an initial article we evoked two aspects of these changes, firstly the sudden awareness of the unexpected magnitude of the diversity of species and, secondly, the need to consider the existence, in addition to the diversity of species, of other levels of organization, mainly individual-within-species diversity and, at the supraspecific level, the diversity of biocenosis and ecosystems. In this article, we present two other aspects characterizing this new vision of the diversity of life: i) a new way of considering the usefulness of biodiversity. Instead of being focused on the production of marketable goods (foods, drugs, raw materials), usefulness now takes into account other aspects that can play a more crucial role in the future: source of innovations based on the mimicry of living organisms (biomimesis), production of ecological services, early and integrative detection of pollutants; ii) a reconsideration of the concept of stability. Instead of being conceived in a static way, with conservation policies based on rigid measures, stability is now perceived as a dynamic equilibrium in which some perturbations can have favourable influences. As a result, conservation strategies now have to protect the evolutionary capabilities of biodiversity much better than simply at a particular state or time.