Rapid baseline changes challenge biodiversity insights

Rapid baseline changes challenge biodiversity insights

While policymakers were meeting in Nagoya to try to thrash out a new deal to preserve biodiversity over the next decade, a group of researchers were meeting at the Royal Society in London to highlight the complexity of the issues, in the face of human encroachment on habitats and the perils of climate change. “From the pioneering explorations of Joseph Banks to the present day, a great deal has...

Biodiversity--an international challenge.

Biodiversity challenge to funding priorities

Ten years after the key Earth Summit in Rio, a key group of influential politicians in Britain are flagging up the need to support research into taxonomy as a basis for biodiversity studies ahead of this summer's meeting in South Africa. Nigel Williams reports.

Biodiversity Informatics: The Challenge of Rapid Development, Large Databases, and Complex Data (Keynote)

There are high expectations in all sectors of society for immediate access to biological knowledge of all kinds. To fully exploit and manage the value of biological resources, society must have the intellectual tools to store, retrieve, collate, analyze, and synthesize organism-level and ecological scale information. However, it currently is difficult to discover, access, and use biodiversity d...

The biodiversity challenge: expanded hot-spots analysis.

This paper aims to throw light on the mass extinction that is overtaking Earth's species. Using an analytic methodology developed for an earlier partial assessment, it focuses on a series of "hotspot" areas, these being areas that a) feature exceptional concentrations of species with high levels of endemism and b) face exceptional threats of destruction. The paper identifies another 8 such ar...