Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Identify significant threats to biodiversityExplain the effects of habitat loss, exotic species, and hunting on biodiversityIdentify the early and predicted effects of climate change on biodiversity

This article presents an overview of news and information presentations around the issue of polar bears drowning at sea due to melting polar ice, and how students might hone their news and information analysis skills taking into account media bias.

If you follow environmental news at all, you'll be familiar with the most common cause of extinction in the world today: habitat loss. Habitat destruction threatens the survival of some the world's most charismatic organisms animals like the giant panda, the Sumatran tiger, and the Asian elephant. Humans have encroached on the wilderness in order to farm, mine, log, and build, and in the process, we've pushed the natural inhabitants of those areas into smaller and smaller refuges. Making matters worse, global climate change caused by our production of greenhouse gases is altering the environments within those refuges, forcing species to contend with new challenges. While these might seem like entirely modern problems, recent research indicates that's not the case and that current levels of habitat loss and climate change could have devastating consequences.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Islands are hotspots of biodiversity. But they’re in danger. Human activities are disrupting the natural habitats of numerous island plant and animal species, causing them to degrade, fragment, or perish altogether. Including here, in the islands of Japan. In response, the Japanese government has recently committed to a 17% expansion of its network of protected areas, spaces such as national parks that support long-term conservation of biodiversity and natural resources. The proposed expansion is one of the common global strategic plans for biodiversity, specifically, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. The problem is that experts have no comprehensive, ecologically justified way of determining which areas to include. Now, a team of researchers from Japan and Finland has devised an analytical framework that could make Japan’s protected area expansion as efficient as possible..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.