From the pioneering explorations of Joseph Banks (later a President of the Royal Society), to the present day, a great deal has been learnt about the extent, distribution and stability of biological diversity in the world. We now know that diverse life can be found even in the most inhospitable places. We have also learned that biological diversity changes through time over both large and small...

Biological diversity would apparently seem the most intuitive and easily studied of all the ecological concepts. However, in practice biodiversity has suffered from great number of definitions that vary with the specific needs of the different researchers, thus making it extremely confusing as an ecological concept. In this paper, I shortly review the concept of biodiversity showing that there ...

Biological diversity in the patent system is an enduring focus of controversy but empirical analysis of the presence of biodiversity in the patent system has been limited. To address this problem we text mined 11 million patent documents for 6 million Latin species names from the Global Names Index (GNI) established by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Encyclopedia of Life...

Advances in molecular biology and hardware technology, such as micro-arrays has made available a tremendous amount of data for biological scientists .In the first part of our paper we highlight the semistructured characteristics and complex nature of biological data and the substantial challenges it poses in data management. In the second part of this paper we stress the need for identifying ex...

Losses of biological diversity, or diversity of life at all levels of biological organization, have crossed a boundary beyond which they pose serious consequences for humanity (Rockstrom et al. 2009). Despite enormous effort by state and global actors to arrest declines in biological diversity, rates of deforestation in the tropics remain high (Asner et al. 2009). Centralized state control of f...