NALT Full

As applied to genetic diversity, erosion is the loss of genetic diversity within a species. It can happen fairly quickly - as with a catastrophic event or change in land use that removes large numbers of individuals and their habitat. But it can also occur more gradually and go unnoticed for a long time. Genetic erosion can represent the loss of entire populations genetically differentiated from others, the loss or change in frequency of specific alleles (i.e., different forms of a gene) within populations or over the species as a whole, or the loss of allele combinations.