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 suspect this answer will not be very satisfying to you, but it is in some sense the true answer so someone should provide it:
There are a great many possible causes in the world, and EA is focused on things which are (plausibly) the most effective in the world. By their nature only a small fraction of all causes are plausible candidates for the most effective, so we should expect most causes to not be EA causes. If you had some concrete arguments for why biodiversity might meet such a stringent standard, people could consider them, but in their absence the 'default' is for something to not be an EA cause.
In particular, in addition to some argument as to why having many species is very important, you might want some sort of comparison to:
* as a first approximation
I think the first dot point deserves fleshing out. I have done a very preliminary analysis of getting prepared with resilient foods for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear winter, and it appears that this is a very cost-effective way of saving species. This is because if many people were starving, not only would they generally not care about preventing other species from going extinct due to the climate impacts, but they would likely actively eat many species to extinction. It would not take that much more work to turn this into an actual paper, and ... (read more)