Habitat loss, climate change, poaching, and pollution paint a bleak picture for threatened and endangered species around the world. The loss of a single species is a tragic event and yet we lose an estimated 10,000 species to extinction every year! Endangered animals in the U.S. include the gray wolf, manatee, ocelot, panther, and many types of bats and whales, but there are countless other undiscovered species threatened by extinction without our knowledge.

Biodiversity refers to the variety of life in any given area. Humans have identified 1.7 million species (groups of living organisms that interbreed) but estimates of total number of species on the planet may total 100 million. Tropical rainforests contain the most biodiversity, and invertebrates (animals without backbones) comprise half of the world’s identified species.

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Transparent Standards: My first and foremost guiding principle was that the services would need to continue to apply transparent and objective standards for all career fields to ensure leaders assign tasks, jobs, and career fields throughout the force based on ability, not gender. In this respect, the services have been able to leverage the great amounts of data they gathered over three years’ worth of studies to make their standards up to date and operationally relevant. We found over the last few years that in some cases we were doing things because that’s the way we’ve always done them.

Population Size: Second, the fact that we’re holding everyone to the same high standards may mean that in some cases, equal opportunity may not always equate to equal participation. Here, we’ll incorporate lessons we’ve learned in the past, like how the Navy has integrated women onto surface ships and more recently, submarines. The Army and the Marine Corps will integrate women officers and senior enlisted into previously-closed units before integrating junior enlisted women, and where they can, they’ll assign more than just one woman into a unit at a time.