Recently in Biodiversity Category

By Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen. You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

Ernest Small's research colleagues at Agriculture Canada had a mystery. Peering at the cellular innards of a clover plant, they wondered why nothing was behaving the way clover should.

They asked Small, a veteran scientist at the Central Experimental Farm, for help.

It didn't take him long to pinpoint the problem. Their clover was an alfalfa.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Taxing+times+taxonomy/6028252/story.html#ixzz1lFjvqWTF


Hat tip: Sandra Knapp (@SandyKnapp)

Just three South East Asian countries support more than 70 percent of the planet's biological diversity.  A substantial part of the region's human population (and often the poorest part of the population) depends directly on these biodiversity resources to provide food, medicine, shelter, clothing and other needs.  Already in the Philippines we are seeing the impact of poor environmental management on coral reefs - threatening the livelihoods of fishermen and undermining the potential for tourism development. (source)

You're probably thinking to yourself, "Yet another pronouncement by yet another environmentalist about how important biodiversity is." Of course, if you read this blog regularly, that's probably not what you're thinking. You know me well enough to know that if it were just another pronouncement by just another environmentalist, I wouldn't bother to highlight the quote so prominently. Instead, you're wondering "What's his angle here? Who said it this time?"

Stephen Lillie, the British Ambassador to the Philippines.

He wrote that in the context of reporting on a recent meeting involving senior officials from the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia "organised by the British Embassy and the ASEAN Center for Biodiversity or ACB (which is based in Los Banos near Manila), the meeting was intended to highlight the importance of correctly valuing biodiversity in a country's economic planning, and how failing to account for the value of ecosystems and biodiversity loss risks wrong choices and decisions."

It is gratifying to see senior government officials take the economic value of biodiversity seriously. As Robert Kennedy put it more than 40 years ago, our

Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.  Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The Dimensions of Biodiversity project that Carl Schlichting, Cindi Jones, John Silander, Andrew Latimer, Justin Borevitz, and I are working on is featured in a recent Discovery article on the NSF website. Here are the first couple of paragraphs of the article:

Climate change is on your porch and in your backyard and living room--anywhere you bedeck with flowering plants.

Global warming affects favorite flowers of garden and vase. This is true of plants around the world, including the proteas and the pelargoniums native to South Africa.

Head over to the NSF site if you'd like to read the whole thing.

Related articles

• Post-doc available (darwin.eeb.uconn.edu)

The National Biodiversity Information Infrastructure (NBII) was taken offline on Sunday. If you visit www.nbii.gov now, you get the Termination Page with the banner above prominently displayed.

Martha Anderson describes efforts at the Library of Congress to archive the website, but as she points out:

[W]e try to get as much of a site we can, and retain functionality as much as possible, but many things do not function the same as on a live site. Anything requiring input to bring up content won't function in the archive.

There is also an archive version at the Internet Archive, but we have lost a valuable resource.

I learned on Tuesday that the National Biodiversity Information Infrastructure (NBII) will be taken offline in January.

January 15, 2012, will see the end of a long-term project to empower users of biological resources data and information. The National Biological Information Infrastructure, or NBII, was begun in 1994 within what was then the National Biological Service (NBS) of the Department of the Interior. Its purpose and mission were to ensure that scientists, resource managers, decision makers, and concerned citizens could go to a single place on the Web and find biological resources data and information from vetted sources--whether in government, academia, non-governmental organizations, or the private sector. (source)

I was very sorry to learn the news. I am not a heavy user of NBII data, but I know that many others are. It has been a vital resource for many as a gateway to data maintained by federal, state, and local governmental agencies and by non-governmental organizations. Those who manage our nations forests, grasslands, and waterways will now have an even more difficult task. An important part of the data on which wise decisions depend will no longer be available to them.

What have we done to ourselves? We will be flying with blinders.

Regular readers will remember that I spent most of July and August in South Africa measuring plants and collecting specimens as part of a large, NSF-funded Dimensions of Biodiversity project. The project focuses on the plant genera Protea and Pelargonium, and we seek both to understand functional trait variation within these and to relate it to the community context in which the plants are embedded.

We are now seeking new post-doctoral research associate to join us on the project. The person we hire will be required to spend a long period of time in South Africa starting in June or July 2012 and will be responsible for design, implementation, and analysis of field and greenhouse experiments that explore the relationship between leaf traits, leaf physiology, and leaf longevity. (See the job ad for a more detailed description of the position and the project web page for more information about the project. Click on the "Dimensions of biodiversity" tag at the bottom of this post or in the tag cloud for some blog posts about the project.)

We'll start reviewing applications in late January. Please pass this ad along to anyone you know who might be interested.

Aldo Leopold was one of the great conservationists of the 20th century. I remember very clearly discovering A Sand County Almanac in the visitors center at Dinosaur National Park during a family vacation when I was in high school. I was already a fan of Thoreau and Muir, but here were essays by a biologist that showed as much reverence for the natural world as Thoreau or Muir and were infused with the understanding of a professional biologist. The Land Ethic spoke to me deeply, as did Thinking Like a Mountain, especially this paragraph:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Tonight the Edwin Way Teale Series on Nature & the Environment opens its 2011-2012 season with a showing of Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for our Time. Curt Meine, who wrote the definitive biography of Aldo Leopold, and Ann and Steve Dunsky, the filmmakers, will join us to answer questions from the audience after the showing. The showing is free to everyone who is interested. Please join us.

Time:  7:00pm
Place: Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center, University of Connecticut

Biodiversity isn't just in the Amazon. It's in your house and in your body. And as Rob says, that's not scary. That's exciting.

[N]o matter how clean your life is, you remain linked to the rest of life. Life drifts through the air in the form of pollen and dust mites. It has sex in your gut or even on your forehead. It is on you, in you and around you, influencing who and what you are. And so embrace the diversity in your life. Read about it too. Read about the mites that live just above your eyebrows, the fungi that live in your lungs, the ants in your backyard, the hamster in your child's room or even the chicken down the road.  (www.yourwildlife.org/about: emphasis added)