What is Biodiversity?

The simplest concepts of biodiversity are something we are taught from an early age.  I am a human, that is a dog, this is a cow.  They all live on the farm.  The beauty of natural ecosystems is they have developed a self-sustaining collection of hundreds of species that all depend on each other in some way.  There are thousands of these different ecosystems across the globe.  All of the food, many materials, pharmaceuticals, the hospitable environment we live in, and even our very existence are all due to millennia of interplay between genetic material and environmental conditions that create and sustain species.  I have chosen to define biodiversity as

           the measure of the genetic and taxonomic complexity of the biotic component of an ecosystem, up to and including the entire planet. 

Biodiversity has provided humans almost everything we have, but we often disrupt these natural systems faster than they are able to repair themselves.  We are far from a complete understanding of what keeps the balance of the natural world, and are likely exceeding several thresholds of a sustainable future for ourselves.  

Study Area

In this blog, I am studying the biodiversity of a portion of the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest that includes the Leatherwood Wilderness.  It is bounded on the north and east by the White River.  I am particularly interested in the novel aquatic ecosystem created by altered water temperature of the river, and any affects to the surrounding terrestrial environment.  Upstream from this section of the National Forest there are two deep reservoirs, Bull Shoals Lake on the mainstem of the White River, and Norfork Lake located 4.5 river miles up the Norfork River from its confluence with the White.  The outflow from these dams is from the deep, cooler water hundreds of feet below the surface.  This cold water is inhospitable to many of the native aquatic species, and they were forced to lower stretches of the river where the temperatures have stabilized.
This created a unique environment of cold water, at a southern latitude.  In the early 1950's rainbow and brown trout were stocked in the tailwater streams, and have grown to world record sizes, thanks to high productivity and longer growing seasons.  This has been followed with other species of trout, of which millions of individuals have been stocked in the following decades.  I have not found documentation of any other intentional stocking of species other than game fish, and I am curious how other aquatic species compositions have been affected (especially macroinvertebrates), or if other non-native coldwater species have found their way into the area through unintentional .  I am also interested if there have been any documented changes to the terrestrial biodiversity with the changes in the water temperature of the river.
Here is a link to a map that shows the section of the Ozark-St Francis National Forest I am interested in.

National Forest Map Viewer