The Biodiversity Struggle
Typical rocky reef habitat in north east New Zealand, characterized by encrusting red algae and Kelp forest. ©Sydney Harris
By now we’re all familiar with the global biodiversity crisis: increasing numbers of species extinct or at risk of extinction; widespread habitat loss and a seemingly endless set of political, logistical and financial obstacles hampering swift action for conservation. The international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has set twenty global diversity targets, many of which require participating nations to conduct accurate and efficient monitoring to assess their progress and inform policy decisions. Governing bodies and organizations worldwide have agreed that immediate, efficient action is essential to preserving our planet’s increasingly threatened ecosystems.
But how? Diversity measurement techniques are a tricky business. Accurately recording diversity can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, expensive, invasive and highly susceptible to human error. Often these methods involve the employment of trained specialists to individually identify hundreds or even thousands of species, a process that can take many months to complete.
Marine habitats are particularly difficult to access because of the physical limitations of humans underwater, and are often flawed due to the influence of our presence on marine organisms. However, the oceans contain many of the world’s most diverse systems, and, despite the limitations of current methods, the need to monitor marine diversity is a top priority for the global conservation movement. Continue reading →
The May issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is absolutely packed! We’ve got a new ecoacoustics method from Metcalf et al. and a new inference and forecasting method from Cenci et al. There’s also a forum article on image analysis, and papers on physiology, palaeobiology, capture-recapture and much more. We’ve got SIX papers that are freely available to absolutely everyone this month too.
