Biodiversity matters. The godfather of biodiversity, Tom Lovejoy, who we unfortunately lost a few months ago, initially coined the term biological diversity, which describes the variety of life, from genes to the ecosystem scale of biological organization. Along with ecosystem services, biodiversity is consistently identified as one of the primary environmental management goals for environmental protection and conservation efforts around the world. In addition to ethical considerations, conserving biodiversity is reciprocally beneficial for human health and , so it is not surprising that the emerging field of planetary health and the one health approach routinely examine diverse connections among public health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Yet in 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) pronounced that biodiversity was decreasing faster than at any other time. Make no mistake; we are experiencing a biodiversity crisis.
