Introduction

Biodiversity is thought of as the combined genetic diversity, species diversity and ecosystem diversity. This concept is extremely important and is helping people responsible for conservation to do a much better job. It helps us to understand our complex environment by seeing the whole picture. Genetic diversity refers to the variety of all the genes between and within a species.

The concept of genetic diversity clearly shows that even small local conservation projects can be extremely valuable at saving local genetic diversity of some plants and many invertebrate animals as well as bacteria, fungus and other organisms in the soil.

Activity outline

Students work in small groups and access information from the web.

This activity has two parts:

Identify five good reasons why genetic diversity is important.
Investigate the genetic diversity of the river red gum.

Five good reasons

1. Discuss with students what is meant by genetic diversity. What is the opposite of having a genetically diverse population of a particular species of animal?

A good example to discuss is the small population of cheetahs in Iran. There is a small isolated population of 200 individuals. Inbreeding occurs when members of the same family or close relatives breed only among themselves. The variation within the genes of the cheetah is much lower than other mammals. In most species, related individuals share about 80 percent of the same genes. With cheetahs, this figure rises to approximately 99 percent! This causes problems with survivorship (a large number of animals dying), poor sperm quality, and greater susceptibility to disesase.

2. In small groups students have five minutes to find reasons why genetic diversity is important.

List these on a board and come to a consensus about which five could be the most important.

Genetic diversity is extremely important with our food crops. Why might this be? Think about how genetic diversity is necessary for the agricultural industry to meet future challenges. How might it help with:

Combatting more resistant crop diseases
Climate change
Ways to use less fertilizer and sprays
Producing more food for the same amount of land and effort
An unknown future in which unexpected things can pop up affecting crops?

River red gum

There are over 600 species of eucalypts in Australia. The species with the greatest distribution is the river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis).

Working in groups, ask students to use a map of Australia and work out the distribution of the tree using a reference from a book or the web (details also available on the Student Worksheet). Groups will need to find images of the tree and see if they can find differences in a variety of locations. Places to look at include:

Rivers in South East Australia.
Barmah forest along the Murray River
Volcanic plains in Victoria
Dry inland river beds in semi-arid regions.

Finally, students should create a presentation to share the information they have found and their answer to the following questions:

How are river red gums important for our environment and why are they important economically?
Why is genetic diversity in eucalypt's important?

Groups can share their presentation with the class.

What's Genetic Diversity?

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