Take a virtual expedition with us to investigate the amazing diversity of life on this planet. Learn what biodiversity is, why it's important, where it's found, how it comes into existence, how you study it, why it's threatened, and how it can be protected.

We are extremely excited to launch this course on biodiversity. Exploring, explaining, and sustaining biodiversity is at the core of the mission of the California Academy of Sciences, and partnering with Khan Academy has given us a wonderful way to share our course around the world.

The Biodiversity Imperative

We chose biodiversity as the focus of our first course with Khan Academy not only because it is so relevant to our institutional mission, but also because biodiversity is literally the stuff of life. It is the diversity of all the species on this planet, the genetic diversity represented by all the individuals, the ecosystem diversity, and the evolutionary lineages represented by all species, living and fossil. Biodiversity is all around us. It is crucial to the quality of our lives and the lives of all other living organisms, but we actually know very little about who all the players are in this pageantry of life, much less the roles they play and the benefits they can and do provide. We do know, however, that we are losing biodiversity at an alarming and unprecedented rate, driven by our own actions that result in habitat loss, pollution, climate change, overfishing and overhunting, to name a few. But it is not all bad news. We are learning more about biodiversity every day, and tremendous advances have been made in protecting and restoring biodiversity in many areas of the world. This course is designed to tell these exciting, amazing, crucial, and at times troubling stories of the diversity of life.