Biodiversity: Biodiversity news & research articles

The study says that poor economic performance is caused partly by high disease burden, which is in turn affected by biodiversity.

Citizen science surveys compare well with traditional scientific methods when it comes to monitoring species biodiversity -- according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

The accelerating disappearance of Earth's species of both wild and domesticated plants and animals constitutes a fundamental threat to the well-being and even the survival of humankind,

The ongoing global growth in the human population will inevitably crowd out mammals and birds and has the potential to threaten hundreds of species with extinction within 40 years, new research shows.

Biodiversification isn't always favoured by living in a hotspot of biodiversity, suggests a study of Australian wood shrubs. The finding, reported in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, goes against previous thinking and boosts our understanding of the factors driving biodiversity.

Cover story in Nature issue - 6th Feb

Provides a real-world example that the loss of key species from a salt marsh can have profound impacts on the overall performance of an ecosystem. Our findings also suggest that the ability for nature to perform well at multiple levels may depend on having many distantly related species present, increasing the chances of maximizing different functions and services. Salt marshes provide many services to humans, including water filtration and coastal buffering, and this study shows that these processes are likely enhanced by the presence of a diverse community of consumers.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) was established by governments in 2001 to encourage free and open access to biodiversity data, via the Internet. Through a global network of 57 countries and 47 organizations, GBIF promotes and facilitates the mobilization, access, discovery and use of information about the occurrence of organisms over time and across the planet

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD, is a regional knowledge development and learning centre serving the eight regional member countries of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan – and based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Between one- and two-thirds of marine species remain to be discovered, researchers estimate

Nature 7/06/2012:The most unique feature of Earth is the existence of life, and the most extraordinary feature of life is its diversity. Approximately 9 million types of plants, animals, protists and fungi inhabit the Earth. So, too, do 7 billion people. Two decades ago, at the first Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world’s nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate. This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.

From Ecology Letter, 18 JAN 2012.
Overall, this review shows that current estimates are very variable, depending on the method, taxonomic group, biodiversity loss metrics, spatial scales and time periods considered. Yet, the majority of models indicate alarming consequences for biodiversity, with the worst-case scenarios leading to extinction rates that would qualify as the sixth mass extinction in the history of the earth.

24 JAN 2012. Suggestseight hypotheses, aimed at encouraging more systematic research on the role of landscape composition and configuration in determining the structure of ecological communities, ecosystem functioning and services

15 May 2012: Evaluates whether the inclusion of more diverse experts and practitioners in ERA improved the ecological knowledge base about South African biodiversity and the potential impacts of genetically modified (GM) crops. We conducted two participatory ERA workshops in South Africa, analyzing potential impacts of GM maize on biodiversity.

Results of this study indicate that even more species will be needed to maintain ecosystem functioning and services than previously suggested

Maintaining the food supply for a growing population and ensuring the conservation of global biodiversity are important challenges facing humanity, but there is debate over how to best to achieve these two goals simultaneously.

Shows that the higher taxonomic classification of species follows a consistent and predictable pattern from which the total number of species in a taxonomic group can be estimated.

The need to know basis of climate change & biodiversity

Assesses the potential impact of climate change on plant diversity in the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) and its interaction with land transformation that has already occurred in the region.

An assessment and valuation of three key services, grazing, tourism and water supply in the arid Succulent Karoo biome in western South Africa - a globally recognised biodiversity hotspot. We were looking for ways and values that could be

Climate change creates new challenges for biodiversity conservation.

Problems and correlates of success in the conservation of Africa’s rain forests were evaluated for 16 protected areas in 11 countries, representing approximately half of all protected areas in this biome.

Analyzes the relationship between cities, local governance and biodiversity.

Science 5 August 2011:Vol. 333 no. 6043. Last year, the $650 million Census of Marine Life (CoML) finished up a decade of work with a bang.

These results undermine previous reports of a negative biodiversity-temperature relationship through time, which we attribute to paleontological sampling biases. Our findings suggest a convergence of global scale macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns for the biodiversity-temperature relationship.