Category:Biodiversity

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Living Planet Report 2018

• Animal populations have declined an astonishing 60 percent since 1970

We live in an age of rapid and unprecedented planetary change. Indeed, many scientists believe our ever-increasing consumption, and the resulting increased demand for energy, land and water, is driving a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. It’s the first time in the Earth’s history that a single species – Homo sapiens – has had such a powerful impact on the planet.

This rapid planetary change, referred to as the ‘Great Acceleration’, has brought many benefits to human society. Yet we now also understand that there are multiple connections between the overall rise in our health, wealth, food and security, the unequal distribution of these benefits and the declining state of the Earth’s natural systems. Nature, underpinned by biodiversity, provides a wealth of services, which form the building blocks of modern society; but both nature and biodiversity are disappearing at an alarming rate. Despite well-meaning attempts to stop this loss through global agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, we are failing; current targets and consequent actions amount, at best, to a managed decline. To achieve climate and sustainable development commitments, reversing the loss of nature and biodiversity is critical...

An Unseen World

The 'Tiny Little Ones'

• There Is a Whole World Inside Every Plant

Microbiomes full of untapped secrets

• The human microbiome: why our microbes could be key to our health

• Human Microbiome Project

• Animals and Fungi: Evolutionary Tie?

It's All Related

Connections & Communities

• "Relational Reality"

• Systems Thinking, "It's All Related"

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Micro- to Macro- ... from the Tiny (as in Tiny Blue Green) 'Micro-Organisms' to the Largest 'Macro-Creatures'

Biodiversity Topics / Wikipedia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_action_plan

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction

Extinction Issues / GreenPolicy -- http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Extinction

Trillions of (micro) species -- https://cosmosmagazine.com/life-sciences/earth-home-trillion-species

Microbial 'new' Tree of Life -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html

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Do Insects Count? Who Cares About Insects, Right? Wrong?

• ‘A different dimension of loss’: inside the great insect die-off

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Saving Species, Notes from the Edge

The botanists’ last stand: The daring work of saving the last samples of dying species

Save a Butterfly, Save a Species / July 31

http://www.boredpanda.com/rare-blue-swallowtail-pipevine-butterfly-repopulation-tim-wong/

https://www.treehugger.com/conservation/pipevine-swallowtail-butterfly-conservation-san-francisco-tim-wong.html

http://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/S-F-biologist-s-passion-for-butterflies-soars-9138329.php#photo-10742592

https://m.facebook.com/CaliforniaPipevineSwallowtail/?hc_ref=ARSW45o6LUperxuN2SrJMOD1SySTFKd-yU4NStZkJ-Xk0NhvAopTgdJUMKXGpcpKqwo&fref=nf

https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/All_Species_Day -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Extinction

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Tree of Life

Tree of Life

Announced September 2015 / http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Tree_of_Life

The first draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species -- The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data...

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• http://www.biodiversitya-z.org/

• http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

• http://www.biodiversitymapping.org/visualizations.htm

• http://www.eol.org/

• http://globaia.org/

• http://www.biodiversityassociation.org/?lang=en

• http://www.bioversityinternational.org/

The ecologist's field guide to sequence-based identification of biodiversity

Keywords: DNA sequencing; metabarcoding; metagenomics; metatranscriptomics; molecular ecology; biodiversity

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All Species Day

Nature was always present... It was participant, impetus, and catalyst. It was the riches that made nations wealthy and powerful, and over which their armies; it was the wildness our ancestors insisted on taming, the scourge that left them despairing, and the blessing that kept them alive. How and where and by what design people built their homes and businesses depended on natural conditions and endowments. Inspirations for what people wrote and painted, what they wore, and said to each other, how they planned their day and spent their leisure time, and what they chose as a livelihood all flowed from an organic setting. Nature shaped strategies in war and gave form to economics, and its wealth or privation determined that of people and their enterprises.

-- The Gulf

by Jack E. Davis

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The Rich Biosphere of the Rainforest Canopy, "Cradle of New Life Forms"

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Rainforest

SJS / GreenPolicy Siterunner:

January 2013

I want to say a few words about Don Perry, Dr. Perry, who swung in and posted a couple comments yesterday about climate change, global warming and its coming impacts.

Be aware, Don is not your standard scientist who has dwelt in academia, collecting accolades and plaudits for his lifetime of work and explorations of the bio-universe. Don has gone on from UCLA to literally change the way we see our world.

As I used to say about Don, when we were working together back when I lived in LA and he was starting his career that would revolutionize the science of tropical forest study, Don is unique in his field, he's a pioneer (and "bioneer"), he's an explorer, an inventor. Don invented new techniques and methods for ascending and studying the 'real jungle', up above far from LA's glam, and proceeded to enable and show us what the resplendent, amazing rainforest, the richest biosphere on earth, the canopy, was like and it was wonderful... first-ever pictures and reports and science from on high. I was privileged to help as his representative and we saw Don's visions reach audiences around the world as he opened eyes to the eco-wonders of the environment we live in and the world we came from long ago, that is, if you believe in evolution... Don was a "Jacques Cousteau of the Rainforest Canopy." I meant the words when I said them and still do. Don's pioneering work has been featured in Scientific American, National Geographic, Smithsonian, New York Sunday Times magazine, Life, Newsweek, Paris Match, Quick of Germany, Popular Science, and many more popular and scientific media.

I have to say that Don's career is one-of-a-kind, an unparalleled feat of brave, courageous ascents and creative imagination and engineering that followed...

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