This video, we're going to talk about NPP. A key factor in species distribution and an indicator of ecosystem health is net primary productivity. Net primary productivity is abbreviated as NPP, and it's often referred to as just the productivity. This is just an estimate of all the organic matter that's available as food in a specific region. The greater the NPP value is, the more food there is in that region.

What this means is that the greater the NPP value, the greater the ecosystem's ability to support more life, essentially allowing for more biomass. Notice below, we've got the satellite image of the entire globe, and we're highlighting two specific regions that have very different NPP values. The first region that we're highlighting is in the northern part of South America, the Amazon rainforest, which has a very high NPP value. This means that it has a lot of organic matter available as food and it's capable of supporting a lot of life. The other region that we're highlighting is in the northern part of Africa, the Sahara Desert, which has a very low NPP value, meaning that it has very little organic matter available as food, therefore it does not support as much life.

So this here concludes our video, and I'll see you all in our next one.