This is a seed for further articulation on why EA should rate the importance of biodiversity higher:
Focusing on human x-risk implicitly assumes that there is something uniquely valuable about being human or having human experience. But then, why should we assume that there is nothing uniquely valuable about the existence of any of the other millions of species that inhabit our planet? We know very little about the experience of other species - the limited information on what we do know is obviously filtered through human eyes, so we are potentially ignorant of a whole range of experience that other species may have, but we do not. Yes, ground beetles cannot build rockets and have no potential for colonizing our local cluster of galaxies, but it is our pre-conditioning human experience, our bias, that allows us to totally dismiss the inherent value of the existence of ground beetles.
As has been mentioned many times before, EA overrepresents welfarist/utilitarian frameworks, which to begin with, hold the individual human as a moral agent, and then defines everything else as a moral patient worthy of consideration using the yardstick of human experience of pain and pleasure. Yes, in this framework, biodiversity is most likely of limited utility. But again, this is NOT the only 'valid' ethical lens out there, and there are many arguments out there for why the basic assumptions are dubious. If aliens exist, perhaps they could have no understanding of pleasure or pain, or otherwise be supersentient, such that we are as relatively conscious as an insect.
If one were to assume the system itself as a 'moral patient' (as some cultures do), then irreversibly removing parts of the system is causing harm to it. Maybe including something as abstract as a 'system' in the circle of moral concern sounds absurd, but again, many cultures, among Indigenous Americans, for example, held that even the well-being of the whole system of plants, animals, and people was worthy of consideration.
Depending on your moral framework, protecting biodiversity is an incredibly urgent and neglected cause area, as the magnitude and speed at which it is happening is great (estimates up to 30% total loss just in this century). There is also, as other commenters spoke to, enormous potential to apply EA-style thinking to this problem. To end with an opinion, protecting biodiversity for the sake of biodiversity is the epitome of the word altruism, as it is outside considerations of utility for ourselves or our progeny (through which we like to imagine ourselves as vicariously living after our death).
I was hoping to see some more answers by now, but seeing none I'll provide some initial points that I expect people who are more familiar with the field could flesh out much better than I. I'm not familiar with the full case for biodiversity, but just based on generic reasoning about cause areas in general, I'd suspect some of the major reasons EAs do not seem to consider it as important as factory farming, wild animal welfare, or even climate change (to name a few environmentally-oriented cause areas) include:
In the end, this isn't to say that biodiversity is necessarily "unimportant" and completely intractable, but given the combined issues surrounding comparative importance, tractability, and neglectedness I don't know if it's really an area where EA would have a comparative advantage in relative to e.g., AI safety/alignment (which itself may prove very impactful for the environment and many other problems), cost-effective health interventions (e.g., bed nets, deworming), and general long-termism. I would be willing to read an argument for why it is overly neglected, but I haven't seen that argument made yet.