Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 2025 number 3

In recent decades, an information boom has arisen around the concept of “biodiversity” in the “whirlpool” of environmental aspects and problems. A negative consequence of its wide popularity has been the vagueness of the semantic content and the shapelessness of the construction of the beloved concept. This has complicated the mutual understanding of specialists in scientific and everyday ecology. Clarifications of the definition of the concept of “biodiversity” and the scope of its use, structuring and connection of its object of interest with evolutionary theory are urgently needed. For this purpose, an ordered system of four structural categories of biodiversity is proposed, embodying the evolutionary potential of the population-species, biocenotic, biogeocenotic and biosphere levels of life organization. The categories of biodiversity are designated by symbols: alpha, beta, gamma, sigma biodiversity. Their emergence and long-term existence are due not only to the complex configuration of ranges that arose due to the capabilities of the biota, but, to a greater extent, to the structural features of the abiotic matrix of the external environment. First of all, modern runoff-water-collecting continental-oceanic and relict basins that have lost their former connection with the World Ocean are important. Such megahabitats, clearly delimited from each other by orographic, hydrological, climatic barriers, contribute to isolation and provide biota with the opportunity to freely choose a set of environmental conditions. However, not all biological species can use them, but only those with a suitable set of preadaptations, capable of getting along with each other and stereotypically reproducing a standard set of biota over a long period of time. Attention is focused on biogeocenoses and their catenary compositions - grandbiomes, confined to heliozones of latitudinal extension and their derivatives - climatic, soil, landscape zones. Biogeocenoses and grandbiomes, as elements of gamma-biodiversity, unlike the previous categories, have the ability to involve in their contact not only living but also inert matter, guaranteeing the transformation of an uncomfortable weathering crust into a comfortable living environment, regulated by the biota at its own discretion. Each evolutionarily subsequent category of biodiversity did not destroy or suppress the previous ones, but mutually incorporated them into its structure. Such a construction resembles a series of nesting dolls, which multiplies the stability of the biodiversity system and its potential, guaranteeing a long-term prolongation of life in time and ubiquity in space of the earth’s surface.