Since 1988, when the term biodiversity was first published, its use has risen exponentially. Currently, as indexed by Biological Abstracts, more than 66,300 journal articles have used the term. Definitions, however, vary widely from the all-encompassing "diversity of life on Earth" to the enigmatic definition adopted by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, "the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems."
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