It just seems to be looking at number of species. We are a small country with reasonably little diversity of geography/climate to provide varied habitats for varied species, so it is no wonder there isn’t huge number of species. We have extremely little real woodland left (yeh not counting coillte there) which would have been the more biodiverse habitat.
well, were small for one so less land mass for all sorts. We have one climate suitable for only a select set of species. It’s not all that surprising that tropical and/or huge countries top the list. We’re in the same league as Latvia and Lithuania, not Brazil and India.
Ireland has a very low number of species, due to glaciation and more recently thousands of years of heavy farming have wiped out more species. Ireland has relatively little wild areas compared with other countries. This is a fascinating chart though and really challenging the notion of Ireland being green.
Ireland’s a single small island with a temperate climate. It’s not gonna have the same level of biodiversity as a large country with different climate zones.
It’s down to farming, and modern farm practices.
Sheep/goats: probably have the destructive effect on biodiversity. Grazing on commonage and mountains has removed almost all trees and many types of plants.
Cattle; in recent times many fields for cattle have become monoculture or duoculture.
All those pictures of “green ireland ” really show an almost dead habitat with no diversity.
The same farmers fighting to get special treatment in climate legislation, that’s your reason.
The ice age and being an island.
Don’t forget the Brits robbing our trees, very quick way to kill everything whose existence is supported by the tree.
We’re a small, temperate island, which already will make us onkynhave a limited number of species. Then during the last ice age Irelamd was covered in ice. That killed off a lot of species. So there weren’t a lot of species even before humans changed the landscape for farming, reducing forest and woodland cover.
This is a very poorly constructed ‘biodiversity’ cheat sheet. It fails to account for key factors such as land area, climate, geography, or a broad range of phyla, to name a few. It’s just clickbait made by someone with some crude data and an Excel sheet.
And I was told we have the most amazing nature in the world.
I have questions about this infographic.
Reptiles is a great example here, wikipedia is telling me we have ***one*** native species of reptile. The infographic is listing nineteen, do we have more reptiles than we should? Why does that then count as a D? Are these statistics in any way normalised for size and location or are we failing because we simply don’t have as much land mass as Brazil?
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done an absolutely appalling job at maintaining our biodiversity but this infographic is bad. A better one would look at the change in biodiversity over time, not absolute numbers as countries are not directly comparable.
Ireland is coast to coast intensive farm.
The problem is almost entirely due to animal farming.
14 comments
It just seems to be looking at number of species. We are a small country with reasonably little diversity of geography/climate to provide varied habitats for varied species, so it is no wonder there isn’t huge number of species. We have extremely little real woodland left (yeh not counting coillte there) which would have been the more biodiverse habitat.
well, were small for one so less land mass for all sorts. We have one climate suitable for only a select set of species. It’s not all that surprising that tropical and/or huge countries top the list. We’re in the same league as Latvia and Lithuania, not Brazil and India.
Ireland has a very low number of species, due to glaciation and more recently thousands of years of heavy farming have wiped out more species. Ireland has relatively little wild areas compared with other countries. This is a fascinating chart though and really challenging the notion of Ireland being green.
Ireland’s a single small island with a temperate climate. It’s not gonna have the same level of biodiversity as a large country with different climate zones.
It’s down to farming, and modern farm practices.
Sheep/goats: probably have the destructive effect on biodiversity. Grazing on commonage and mountains has removed almost all trees and many types of plants.
Cattle; in recent times many fields for cattle have become monoculture or duoculture.
All those pictures of “green ireland ” really show an almost dead habitat with no diversity.
The same farmers fighting to get special treatment in climate legislation, that’s your reason.
The ice age and being an island.
Don’t forget the Brits robbing our trees, very quick way to kill everything whose existence is supported by the tree.
We’re a small, temperate island, which already will make us onkynhave a limited number of species. Then during the last ice age Irelamd was covered in ice. That killed off a lot of species. So there weren’t a lot of species even before humans changed the landscape for farming, reducing forest and woodland cover.
This is a very poorly constructed ‘biodiversity’ cheat sheet. It fails to account for key factors such as land area, climate, geography, or a broad range of phyla, to name a few. It’s just clickbait made by someone with some crude data and an Excel sheet.
And I was told we have the most amazing nature in the world.
I have questions about this infographic.
Reptiles is a great example here, wikipedia is telling me we have ***one*** native species of reptile. The infographic is listing nineteen, do we have more reptiles than we should? Why does that then count as a D? Are these statistics in any way normalised for size and location or are we failing because we simply don’t have as much land mass as Brazil?
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done an absolutely appalling job at maintaining our biodiversity but this infographic is bad. A better one would look at the change in biodiversity over time, not absolute numbers as countries are not directly comparable.
Ireland is coast to coast intensive farm.
The problem is almost entirely due to animal farming.