One of the results of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill is the threat to various species in the gulf’s ecosystem; it disturbed and, in some cases, forever altered the __________ of the Gulf Coast.

The sentence describes threats to many different species and changes to the Gulf Coast ecosystem. Biodiversity means the variety of living things in an area, so the spill disturbed the Gulf Coast’s biodiversity. Agriculture, deforestation, and desertification do not describe the variety of species in an ecosystem.

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