Biodiversity is crucial to human well-being, sustainable development, and poverty reduction. Agro-biodiversity has always formed the basis for human food production systems and has provided cultural, spiritual, religious, and aesthetic value for human societies. Agro-biodiversity refers to all crops and animals, their wild relatives, and the species that interact with and support these species. It includes the variety and variability of living organisms that contribute to food and agriculture in the broadest sense. As such, these species would usually be considered under the term agro-biodiversity. The importance of various components of agricultural biodiversity and the contribution they make to sustainable production, livelihoods, and ecosystem health are now widely appreciated. Improved management and use of diversity for production necessary, fortunately, awareness of the need for sustainable agricultural production has increased, in response to the unprecedented population growth, food demand, and regionally high per capita use of natural resources and global environmental change that is now occurring. The focus is shifting to a greater reliance on ecological goods and services, which is especially important for modern intensive agriculture since there will be less-damaging effects on environmental quality and on the biodiversity of wildlands. Conservation of existing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and the adoption of biodiversity-based practices have been proposed as ways to increase the sustainability of agricultural production.
Biodiversity is key to food security and nutrition. It is needed to sustainably produce enough nutritious food in the face of challenges, such as climate change and growing populations with changing diets. Production should address not only the quantity of food or calories but high nutrient values such as vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients as well. In agricultural ecosystems, maintenance of biological diversity is important both for food production and to conserve the ecological foundations necessary to sustain life and rural livelihoods. Agriculture is a major user of biodiversity but also has the potential to contribute to the protection of biodiversity. Occupying more than one-third of the land in most countries of the world, if managed sustainably, agriculture can contribute to important ecosystem functions. These include maintenance of water quality, erosion control, biological pest control and pollination.
Both native and exotic plants sp. are valuable in biodiversity conservation but native plants sp. Due to modernization all, our natural and agricultural resources have been depleted rapidly. Concrete extension efforts are needed to conserve biodiversity especially in agriculture and other fields. Agriculture extension personnel need to be trained in this field is the need of the hour. We can conserve our biodiversity through planting more plants or by conserving the existing plant through, community seed bank, educating women about the importance of biodiversity conservation, strict enforcement of various laws related to biodiversity.
Mr. Thatchinamoorthy C