Conserving Botanical Diversity on a Global Scale

Conserving Phylogenetic Diversity Can Be a Poor Strategy for Conserving Functional Diversity.

For decades, academic biologists have advocated for making conservation decisions in light of evolutionary history. Specifically, they suggest that policy makers should prioritize conserving phylogenetically diverse assemblages. The most prominent argument is that conserving phylogenetic diversity (PD) will also conserve diversity in traits and features (functional diversity [FD]), which may be...

A small-scale land-sparing approach to conserving biological diversity in tropical agricultural landscapes.

Two contrasting strategies have been proposed for conserving biological diversity while meeting the increasing demand for agricultural products: land sparing and land sharing production systems. Land sparing involves increasing yield to reduce the amount of land needed for agriculture, whereas land-sharing agricultural practices incorporate elements of native ecosystems into the production syst...

The price of conserving avian phylogenetic diversity: a global prioritization approach

The combination of rapid biodiversity loss and limited funds available for conservation represents a major global concern. While there are many approaches for conservation prioritization, few are framed as financial optimization problems. We use recently published avian data to conduct a global analysis of the financial resources required to conserve different quantities of phylogenetic diversi...

Change on a Global Scale

Large-Scale Knowledge Acquisition from Botanical Texts

Free text botanical descriptions contained in printed floras can provide a wealth of valuable scientific information. In spite of this richness, these texts have seldom been analyzed on a large scale using NLP techniques. To fill this gap, we describe how we managed to extract a set of terminological resources by parsing a large corpus of botanical texts. The tools and techniques used are prese...