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Biodiversity The "multi-word" biodiversity means the overall diversity of our native ecosystems and species. It comes from the words biological meaning anything that has life and diversity meaning the number of different types of things. Biodiversity means the overall diversity of our native ecosystems, such as forests It could be the number of insects on a tree, the number of trees in a forest or the number of forests in the world or the number of worlds in the universe - who knows! The New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy aims to maintain and restore a full range of natural habitats and ecosystems in a healthy functioning state to maintain and restore viable populations of all indigenous species across their natural range to maintain the genetic resources of introduced species that are important to New Zealand for economic, biological and cultural reasons. This is a national strategy with a 20-year time frame and nearly 150 recommended actions. It has been developed so that all people in New Zealand can work together on maintaining our biodiversity. Print friendly page