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| The UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) is developing an internet-based information system, ECOiSHARE, to provide open access to biodiversity data and environmental information produced and held by multinational companies. |
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Why is ECOiSHARE important?
A large quantity of biodiversity information originates from governments,
NGOs and academic institutions. Increasingly however, the private sector
and particularly multinational corporations working in the oil, gas and
mining sector, are known to hold an enormous amount of biodiversity and
other environmental data, at a variety of spatial scales. As such, these
companies potentially have much to offer the wider scientific and biodiversity
research community.
Many multinationals within such resource development industries realize the increasing importance of transparency in their activities and their consequential impacts on the natural world, to their shareholders, internal company audiences and the wider world.
ECOiSHARE aims to build on environmental reporting processes and mechanisms that are already in place and being undertaken by many private sector companies. The initiative aims to add value to such activities, by providing open access to biodiversity and environmental data gathered and held by contributing multinational partners, through a web-based interface.
The audience for this newly accessible biodiversity information will include multinational petroleum, mining and extraction industry decision-makers and business unit leaders, national governments, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, international biodiversity conventions and the scientific community.
ECOiSHARE Objectives
Working initially with three multinational resource development companies
the ECOiSHARE project aims to develop a readily accessible internet-based
information system, dedicated to mobilising and providing clear, valuable
biodiversity information, supplied by the three project partners.
Beginning in May 2001, a pilot phase of ECOiSHARE began focussing on the utilization of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and the creation of metadatasets derived from these, following their dissemination. EIAs provide an excellent source of data since international and national law requires EIAs to be conducted when new exploration and extraction developments are being proposed, or when considering significant modifications to existing projects or installations.
Frequently, biodiversity studies are undertaken to support EIAs, and continued biodiversity monitoring occurs throughout the life cycle of projects. Other biodiversity information in the form of raw data, species, remediation or restoration studies, ecosystem assessments and evaluations will be incorporated into the information system in the future.
ECOiSHARE aims to:
Six EIAs consisting of c. 18 volumes (data collections) were received from the three ECOiSHARE partners for initial review by UNEP-WCMC. Building on Dublin Core metadata principles and knowledge gained through the EIA review process, an Access database has been constructed, and data population of material / information held within the EIAs has begun. There are currently in excess of 700 data records contained within the database.
An internally accessible web-based interface has been developed, allowing for the querying of textual data held within the database. Additionally a web-based IMS (Internet Map Server) interface has also been developed, linking directly to the metadata database, thus providing the geographic context to the data held within the database. Both of these interfaces are being further developed and refined, in response to user testing and feedback.
Additional activities currently underway include the full documentation and review of the database and metadata / interface format. Pilot phase information will be made available to the wider scientific community following this consultation period, in mid-2002.
-- Mark Collins
)
An international team of cave-diving scientists is exploring previously unknown cave systems. They are collecting and describing large numbers of new species and learning important information about their ecology and conservation.
Anchialine habitats are flooded inland marine caves and ground waters that lack any direct surface connection with the open sea. They are inhabited by remarkable animals, long-term survivors of ancient lineages, which are threatened by changes in their fragile habitat. In recent years approximately 250 new species, 50 new genera, at least 10 new families, two new orders and even a new class of crustaceans have been described from anchialine caves. So many new species are being found that scientists are struggling to keep up with the task of describing and naming the new species.
Cave diving has been referred to as “the most dangerous science,” but a better understanding of anchialine fauna is expected to yield many benefits: these primitive 'living fossils' can provide a ‘missing link’ to help us understand the origin of life on Earth; groundwater organisms like these can be used as an 'early warning system' to detect human disturbances to ecosystems; and some of these animals may contain important chemicals, for example certain cave sponges may have much higher anti-cancer activities than related sponges living outside caves in the open ocean. The new information on anchialine fauna is helping to protect these unique and fragile ecosystems. In Australia, a number of anchialine taxa and entire faunal communities have recently been accorded protected status under Western Australian or Commonwealth legislation.
This project has the following objectives through 2001-2002:
Expeditions are surveying the fauna of anchialine caves in nine areas across the world - The Bahamas, Bermuda, The Loyalty Islands (New Caledonia), Spain (Mallorca and the Canary Islands), The Dominican Republic, Mexico (Yucatan), Australia, USA (Texas) and Japan.
An astonishing variety of previously unknown crustacean taxa have already been found and described in expeditions since 2000, including two new families (Palpophridae and Speleophriidae (Boxshall and Jaume, 2000)), 16 new genera and 48 new species. These newly discovered life forms have been described in scientific publications either published in 2000 and 2001, or to be published (see below). Many of the new species are being named after cave-dwelling dwarves from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
Information resulting from these expeditions, on the many newly discovered taxa and on the distribution, ecology and threats to anchialine fauna, will be made available in publications, in films and online at http://www.cavebiology.com. Existing databases on species from Mexico, the Bahamas and Bermuda will be continuously expanded and updated, and a new online database for Mallorcan species will be launched. The researchers will develop a Bermuda Cave and Karst Information System (BeCKIS), which will use GIS and be multitiered with maps, environmental quality and taxonomic data.
Recent Publications:
Presentations:
Radio:
Past Film Projects:
Future Publications:
An example of a recently discovered species is the shrimp Naushonia manningi. This depigmented species was collected from shallow, saltwater pools in the interior of an inland cave on Acklins Island, Bahamas. Like many other cave species, it is known only from a single cave and nowhere else on Earth. Due to its highly restricted distribution, it is thus susceptible to environment disturbances that could threaten the species with extinction. Little is known about its habits, life history or ecology.
Thetispelecaris remex represents a new order of crustaceans. It is most closely related to a genus containing deep sea species from the Tasmanian Sea and Atlantic Ocean. This species has been collected from several marine caves that more or less directly connect with the open sea. Again, little is know about its life history or ecology.
Lists of cave species from the Bahamas, Bermuda and Yucatan are found respectively at:
Photo galleries of cave species from the Bahamas and Yucatan are found at:
-- Tom Iliffe
Frogwatch USA (website)
Over the past 150 years, rapid growth in agriculture, industry and urban development has resulted in dramatic changes in our environment. The changes pose significant challenges for animals and plants, as seen with the decline of frogs, toads and salamanders. Understanding the decline of amphibian populations is crucial in uncovering how people's activities are affecting water quality, wildlife habitat and other aspects of our environment. We share our environment with amphibians and their decline may foreshadow challenges we will have to face in the 21st century.
Frogwatch USA is a long-term anuran (frog and toad) monitoring program which actively engages the public in the conservation of local wetlands while complementing and facilitating broader efforts to implement amphibian monitoring across the United States. During the IBOY, the project will extend it's reach to yield continent-wide information as it assists an international monitoring program for The Nature Conservancy and Association for Biodiversity Information in Central and South America and through collaborations with Canadian Frogwatch. In 2001 and 2002, the data collected will provide valuable information about anuran species distributions, population trends at individual wetlands, and yearly vocalization phonologies.
Opportunities for the public to get involved in surveys of frogs in other countries include:
-- Amy Goodstine and Sam Droege
Insect@thon (website)
Children from disadvantaged Namibian schools are participating in Insect@thon, a unique contest that is improving accessibility to biodiversity information in museums, and at the same time providing schoolchildren with important computer experience and equipment.
There is a wealth of information on biodiversity in museums and other collections that exists in non-digital forms, inaccessible to a broad audience and for quantitative analysis. Some of these biodiversity specimens and information are held in the museums of nations where the species were collected and some of it is held in museums in other nations far away. For example, Insect@thon leaders estimate that some 70% of natural history collections in the major museums of the first world originate in developing countries. This information needs to be rapidly computerized, so that it can be made available for research, conservation and education programs.
Insect@thon is an international school contest, created by the National Museum of Namibia, that computerizes important biodiversity data and at the same time increases access to the internet in schools. Children from competing schools enter paper-based information into computerized databases. For many children, it is the first time they have touched a computer. Winning schools receive prizes including support to connect to the internet prizes, trips to natural history museums abroad and biodiversity safaris.
In Namibia the 1999 and 2000 Insect@thons have been enormously successful, enabling 70% of non-computerized insect data at the National Museum of Namibia to be digitized. It will have connected 200 Namibian schools to the internet by the end of 2001. Trips to museums in the first world are also helping to repatriate Namibian biodiversity data. In April 2000 the 1999 Insect@thon winning school team traveled to Sweden to carry out mini-Insect@thons at the Riks museum in Stockholm and the Lund University Museum, where the children computerized valuable Namibian insect records.
Recent and Upcoming Events:
Early 2002 - the winning school from the Namibia 2000 Insect@thon travels to the world famous Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, USA to visit the museum and take part in a mini-Insect@thon. The children will also attend school in East Baltimore, collect local insects with students from an Arlington high school and visit other museums in the area (This event was originally due to take place in September 2001, but was postponed because of the terrorist activities in the USA).
Insect@thon hopes to raise funds to take its road show to museums and schools in Zimbabwe and Zambia in 2001 and 2002.
Inventory of the caterpillars, their parasitiods, their food plants, and their gut microbes in a Costa Rican tropical dry forest, cloud forest and rainforest (website)
This long-term survey is finding, identifying and photographing the 9,500-plus species of caterpillars known to occur in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) conserved wildland in northwestern Costa Rica. Caterpillars are crucial components of tropical forest ecosystems. They are major consumers of tropical vegetation (consuming more living tropical foliage than any other group of animals) and essential prey for many birds, mammals, other insects, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. They are also major movers and multipliers of the microbial community. Caterpillars make many interesting defensive and communication chemicals that are potential sources of lead molecules in biodiversity prospecting. Furthermore, butterflies and moths - adult caterpillars - are critical pollinators and important for ecotourism. Despite their importance, few tropical caterpillars have been scientifically described and matched with their adults. In the ACG, only 2,500 species have been discovered, and there are at least 7,000 species still to be described.
Many of the caterpillars in the ACG, their host plants, and their parasitoids occur across Central and South America. Therefore, the survey is providing information on trophic structures, and plant-animal interactions, that is important for understanding how the forest ecosystem intersects with society at a continental scale. Because the ACG is a conserved wildland, this survey will also provide baseline data against which biodiversity loss can be measured.
It is expected that in 2001, the project will discover and place on the web at least 500 species of previously unknown caterpillars, their host plants, and their parasitoids. It will link its web site in real time through a wireless intranet to the five rearing stations spread across the ACG dry forest, cloud forest and rainforest.
Recent and Upcoming Activities:
Radio
Knowledge of deep sea benthic organisms is very poor and although their diversity is believed to be high, there exists no reliable estimate of species numbers in the deep sea. It is generally not known for most taxonomic groups:
To help understand the deep sea better, a consortium of researchers across a large number of biodiversity institutions are collaborating to study the fauna of a selected region, a latitudinal gradient of the Atlantic ocean, with the same methods. This coordinated approach is yielding unprecedented data for a large number of taxa from a large geographic area, enabling patterns in diversity and distribution to be identified.
Recent and Upcoming Activities:
June 2000, 28 Spanish and German
scientists conducted a survey of deep sea organisms at a depth of
5000m, along a 700 km north-south transect of the Angola Basin. Working
from the RV "Meteor"
they worked night and day for four weeks to sample as much biodiversity
as possible. Most knowledge of deep-sea diversity comes from habitats
on, or close to, the continental slope, which may be untypical compared
with the abyssal depths. This survey explored the basin’s depths.
Following the expedition, 39 international scientists were sent the collected samples of fauna ranging from microscopic bacteria and protists to large macrofauna. Throughout 2001 and 2002, these samples are being examined, identified and quantitative analyses are being performed to describe new species and provide new hypotheses on specialization and distribution of deep-sea benthic life.
September 18, 2001 - The preliminary findings were presented at a workshop at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. The preliminary findings revealed a large number of new species from this remote and inaccessible habitat. For example:
Preliminary results also indicate that while the deep-sea sediments look uniform there are large differences in the composition of the sediments and the distributions of the fauna.
Read more about the preliminary findings of this expedition in the IBOY Newsletter: Issue 2.
April 11, 2002 - Participants of the expedition came together to compare their first results in Frankfurt, Germany. For more details see the IBOY Newsletter: Issue 5.
Further findings will be presented at a meeting of all participants to take place in 2002.
Pictures:
Publications:
MACROFAUNA: An Endangered Resource in a Changing World (website)
The MACROFAUNA Project is bringing together forty scientists from 32 countries to share their knowledge to develop the first global assessment of the state of soil macrofauna. They are pooling their data in the MACROFAUNA database and developing standardized research methods to examine how soil biodiversity is influenced by (1) geography, vegetation, climate and soil type and (2) different land use practices. This information will enable scientists to determine which agricultural practices are best able to support life in the soil.
Why is soil macrofauna important?
The next great challenge for agriculture development is to save the biodiversity and enhance use of biological resources that have been neglected during the decades of the green agricultural revolution. Soil invertebrates are irreplaceable actors of soil formation and conservation in natural ecosystems and the general unsustainability of agricultural systems worldwide is attributable, at least partly, to their local disappearance.
Soils of the world host abundant and highly diverse invertebrate communities. They are sensitive indicators of soil quality and recognized agents of soil fertility. Among the vast diversity of species, adaptive strategies and size range represented, a specific group, macrofuana (also called soil ecosystem engineers), includes large invertebrates (macroinvertebrates) that actually determine activities of other smaller organisms through the mechanical activities that they realise in soil. Soil engineers include all the invertebrates that produce organo-mineral structures (nests, galleries, casts...) that may persist from days to months and years: earthworms, termites, ants and a number of other invertebrates of a size larger than ca. 1cm.
Intensive agricultural systems generally severely deplete macrofaunal diversity and abundance. Management of their communities is now considered an efficient way to improve the sustainability of agricultural systems. The design of techniques that make use of this resource will necessitate a much more comprehensive knowledge of the composition of these communities worldwide, and their reaction to a large set of specific soil conditions and disturbances, than exists today.
The MACROFAUNA Project:
The MACROFAUNA project will compile all the existing data on macroinvertebrate communities collected in nearly 600 sites with the TSBF standard method, stimulate further data collections, organize them in the MACROFAUNA database and process these data to produce comprehensive indexes of soil quality and improved knowledge of this resource worldwide. A website will be created with a clear description of methods, illustrations, identification keys and databases. Information on available and developing technologies aiming at stimulating faunal activities will also be provided.
Objectives:
The First IBOY-MACROFAUNA Workshop, Bondy (France) 19-23 June 2000
Over 40 international experts from 12 countries gathered to plan the MACROFAUNA database and webpage. The participants:
The report of this meeting can be found here.
Recent and Upcoming Activities:
Further Reading:
Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) (website)
An international consortium of marine scientists is working to develop an information system to increase accessibility to much needed information on marine ecosystems. They are compiling existing datasets to form an interoperable data system, generating new data to fill knowledge gaps, and presenting this information in forms such as internet atlases of marine life.
The need for an OBIS
There is no adequate system for the global retrieval of data on ocean biology. The few existing databases do not usefully summarize known distributions of marine life, nor are they organized to encourage frequent use and inter-comparison of data. The Ocean Biogeographical Information System (OBIS) will be an on-line, user-friendly system for absorbing, integrating and assessing data about life in the oceans, and will stimulate systematics research and generate new hypotheses about evolutionary and ecological processes. “OBIS will enable scientists to answer urgent questions about marine biodiversity, its origin and maintenance that have been simply impossible to address with present data and data access," explains Fred Grassle, Chair of the Census of Marine Life Scientific Steering Committee, of which OBIS is part.
The Census of Marine Life (CoML), with a Secretariat based at the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education in Washington, D.C., USA, is an emerging international research program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the world's oceans. This decade-long program will support studies that will amass a large amount of new data on marine biology. One of the critical needs for this program will be the infrastructure to manage these data as well as historical data, and allow access to them by researchers and others around the world. For that reason, the CoML program has established the development of OBIS as one of its first priorities.
OBIS will be an online global network of databases that users can search for information taxonomically (by entering an organism's name) or geographically (by clicking on any map area). Users will be able to search, retrieve, map and analyze data. Information on species distributions, how they vary in space and time, correlations to environmental factors, location of specimens and a history of the research will be available.
How OBIS is being developed in 2001 and 2002
Much of the initial information available through the OBIS system will be compiled from existing databases that will be made interoperable with OBIS to provide information in a distributed, multi-tiered architecture. In 2000, eight grants totaling $3.7 million were awarded to projects involving researchers from 63 institutions across 15 countries to initiate the design of the OBIS system and begin populating it with data. These projects will lead to the development of new internet atlases that display aspects of marine life from the distribution of squid to the DNA sequences of tiny zooplankton. It is hoped that additional grants will be awarded in the future.
The years 2001 and 2002 will see the initial development of this data management system. In May 2001, an international steering committee for OBIS was established. This group will develop a metadata catalog of primary data sources, agree on minimum metadata standards and protocols, set priorities for inclusion of existing databases and for new data discovery, recommend an international network of taxonomic authorities to resolve nomenclature issues, and make recommendations related to the issue of intellectual property rights. In May 2001 the U.S. National Science Foundation funded development of the web interface for OBIS at Rutgers University, USA.
The organization of OBIS during IBOY will require continued meetings with representatives of international database organizations such as GBIF, FAO, UNESCO, IOC, Register of Marine Organisms, Species 2000, Gaia 21, GenBank, Zoological Record, European Registry of Marine Organisms (ERMS) and representatives of national biodiversity or oceanographic data centers.
On February 17, 2002 Fred Grassle presented the latest developments of OBIS as part of the Symposium “The Census of Marine Life: Challenges in Biodiversity” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting and Science Exposition, Boston, USA.
On November 25 - 27 2002, OBIS will cohost an international symposium on oceanographic data management "The Colour of Ocean Data" in Brussels, Belgium . The program will consist of invited papers, technical sessions, selected oral and poster presentations and a final panel discussions. Themes to be addressed include Marine Capacity Building in Global Programmes, Biodiversity Data:Standardization and Exchange, New Internet Developments and their Significance for Ocean Data Mnagement, Ecological and Community data, Ocean Data in Decision-Making: Case Studies. More information is available at http://www.vliz.be/En/Activ/Cod/cod.htm.
An earlier website, developed for OBIS that describes its early conceptualization and development, can be found at http://marine.rutgers.edu/OBIS/
Recommended reading:
-- Fred Grassle
Ocean Oasis: A Story of the Unbreakable Bonds between a Parched land, a Rich Sea, and the People who Love them Both (website)
A giant-screen film about Baja California, to tour world-wide in 2001, with an accompanying website and teachers' guide. Baja California seems to be two separate worlds: One is a long spine of rock and desert where plants store water for years and some animals never drink and urinate crystals. The other is a sea that boils with life, a place so appealing that some of the greatest creatures on Earth travel thousands of miles to get there in order to mate or give birth, where birds gather by the thousands, where there is such richness in the sea that it becomes an oasis of nourishment and shelter for living things for thousands of miles around. The film tells the story of the profound links between the two worlds through the voices of several people who love this place and try to understand it: a fisherman, an ecologist, a zoologist, a naturalist and a marine biologist.
Ocean Oasis premiered at the Samuel C. Johnson IMAX Theater, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, September 12th, 2000. Its European Premiere followed on September 14, 2000 at the Giant Screen Theater Association, Frankfurt, Germany. It premiered in its hometown of San Diego on March 31, 2001 from which it embarked on its international tour. Ocean Oasis was the winner of the "Best Theatrical Program" awardat the bi-annual 2001 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.
Itinerary of the Ocean Oasis Tour
--Michael Hager
During 2001 and 2002 data on a virtual explosion of newly discovered microbial diversity will be synthesized. It is expected that many thousands of newly reported bacteria and archaea will be described as part of this effort.
In recent years, there have been dramatic advances in our understanding of the prokaryotes (organisms such as bacteria and archaea, with no membrane separating the DNA-containing area from the rest of the cell). In particular, new molecular techniques that enable examination of prokaryote diversity with or without cultivation have rapidly accelerated knowledge of these organisms. These methods rely on cloning and sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences. They have revealed enormous biodiversity among microbes, showing, for example, that groups known as the Bacteria and the Archaea are as different from each other as they are from us. Furthermore, these groups contain dozens of sub-groups that are each as distantly related to each other as are animals to plants. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider these sub-groups equivalent to microbial "kingdoms." Recent surveys in natural habitats have found several previously unknown kingdoms, and more are being found during ongoing research.
Newly described sequences are collected in the Ribosomal Database Project (RDP), which assesmbles data from Genbank and elsewhere. RDP has more than 50,000 sequences currently available. This project will survey and synthesize information from the RDP and recent literature on the new prokaryote sequences discovered over 2001 and 2002. The resulting synthesis will be published in scientific journals and on-line for both specialists and the public.
Marine sediments are believed to harbor particularly high microbial diversity, and yet their inaccessibility has rendered them especially poorly understood. As part of this project, in 2001 surveys to explore microbial diversity will include surveys of marine sediments surrounding a kelp forest and an Australian coral reef.
Further Reading:
SAFRINET (website)
SAFRINET is an official Southern African Development Community (SADC) project and the southern African network of BioNET-International. Its purpose is to build capacity for the provision of taxonomic services, i.e.:
Taxonomic capacity is needed for virtually every endeavor concerning biological organisms. SAFRINET is mostly concerned with genuine, important needs. Together with the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP), SAFRINET is focusing on building an alien invasive species (AIS) information hub, and the pilot project that will engage both identification services and information is phytosanitary services, which is essential for:
The indirect benefits are improved agriculture and reduced need to remove AIS from natural ecosystems, which inter alia contributes to:
Phytosanitary services depend on taxonomic capacity. The diversity of
potentially harmful species associated with internationally traded agricultural
products is massive, and an effective phytosanitary service will require
many highly training experience taxonomists. SADC countries are unlikely,
in the foreseeable future, to achieve this. Yet the need remains urgent.
As technology exists for the development of tools that will identify quarantine
organisms (electronic keys, computer image recognition, molecular and
biochemical techniques etc.), an effective, harmonized phytosanitary service
can be implemented. For this SADC requires developed country partners,
some of whom are the Universities of Amsterdam and Bonn, CAB International
and the Smithsonian Institution.
API’s achievements:
To happen before 31 December 2002, SAFRINET will:
Species 2000 (website)
The names of organisms are the key to biodiversity communications, and as such, provide access to the accumulated knowledge of all life on earth. However, no catalog or comprehensive indexing system exists for the estimated 1.75 million species of plant, animal, fungi and microorganisms named by science. This lack of a widely accessible index, with an inbuilt mechanism for maintenance and updating is a significant impediment to research, as it hinders the synthesis of biological information from numerous sources needed for a holistic understanding of biodiversity. As Species 2000 Project Leader Frank Bisby explains, "understanding biodiversity depends on large-scale concepts, biomes, ecosystems, phyla, floras and fauna, hotspots, genetic erosion and the impact of alien species, abstractions put together by synthesizing the myriad observations and studies by local observers local teams and local institutions." Lack of a global species index also hinders nations wishing to fulfill their obligations under the Convention of Biological Diversity, since, according to Bisby, "People who set conservation priorities do not just assess local information, they need to understand the whole, they need information for instance from neighboring regions and from climatically similar lands in distant continents."
While no comprehensive species list exists, many regional datasets, and species lists for groups of organisms do exist, collated and maintained by a diverse set of disparate organizations. The initial aim of Species 2000 is to bring these together with the common purpose of making their species lists available to interested parties worldwide. By providing a validated species index, Species 2000 will act as a clearing house or single entry point for different species lists, allowing species related information to be more easily drawn upon and providing a global comparator for inventories.
Approximately 55% of known species will be available from existing databases. Resources will be sought to help establish new databases for the remaining 45% of described species. Bisby estimates that a critical mass of 300,000 species will be covered by 2001. In 2001 a CD-ROM based 'Species 2000 Catalog of life Annual Checklist 2001' and an internet-based 'Dynamic Checklist' will be published.
It is hoped that 2001 will also see the launch of a demonstration project that will produce a digital library of linked biodiversity databases, containing much more than taxonomic information. For the demonstration project, biodiversity databases in Sao Paulo State, Brazil, including BIOTA-SP, will be linked with the Species 2000 catalog of life. This two-way link will provide an interactive digital library, with distributed resources from multiple databases, to assist biodiversity inventory projects. It will foreshadow Species 2000 ultimate goal of linking such rich data sources across the world.
Publications:
Survey of stickleback parasites (website)
A team of forty-three scientists from sixteen countries across the northern hemisphere are collaborating to survey parasites of stickleback fish. They will analyze the DNA of the protozoan and metazoan parasites of these fish to help understand the biodiversity, foodweb structure, and the ecosystem stress of the communities. The results will also help scientists use parasites as rapid bioindicators of ecosystem health.
Parasites are ideal organisms to use as indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem structure, and to monitor change. Parasites within a single assemblage represent different phylogenetic lineages, which means they possess different life cycles and respond differently to various environmental conditions. They possess rapid generation times compared to their hosts, so that environmental effects are manifested more quickly. Furthermore, because many parasites possess complex life cycles and rely on the presence of intermediate hosts and predator prey relationships for transmission, they can be used to evaluate foodweb structure and trophic interactions of communities. All these properties result in parasites being excellent early bioindicators of impending ecosystem stress.
To study parasites as indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem structure comparatively across systems, it is important to find a host with a broad biogeographic range. Sticklebacks are ideal host for studying aquatic ecosystems, since they are among the most widely distributed fish in the northern hemisphere, occur in coastal, brackish and freshwaters and in both disturbed and pristine habitats. Furthermore, there is already considerable baseline data and they are easy to catch.
In the summers of 2001 and 2002, the research team collected protozoan and metazoan parasites of sticklebacks from more than 30 sites in diverse habitats of North America, Europe and Asia. They will build an international database on the distribution and abundance of stickleback parasites and a database of stickleback tissue that will provide important information on their biogeography and ecology and how they may be used as indicators to examine the impacts of environmental stressors on biodiversity. Links are being developed with Parks Canada to use stickleback parasites for monitoring the health of freshwater and coastal ecosystems.
This international endeavor will build on the Canadian National Stickleback Parasite Survey. Further information on the project including methodology can be found at http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/parasites/indexen/modulei.htm
The database for the 2001 collections will be completed in Spring 2002 and for the 2002 collections in Fall 2002. The results on the biogeography of stickleback parasites and their utility as indicators of environmental stress on biodiversity will be summarized in a series of presentations and publications in 2002 and 2003.
Upcoming and Recent Activities:
Television Trust for the Environment: Earth Report (website)
For IBOY, four twenty-five
minute films on biodiversity will be produced as part of Television Trusts
for the Environment Earth Report. They will first be broadcast on BBC
World, then translated into thirty languages and distributed to land based
stations around the world to a global audience approaching two billion
people.
In the first of these programs, leaders from the world's top environmental
organizations came together to debate and discuss The Future of Life
On Earth. The BBC/TVE Wildscreen debate featured key international
figures with prime responsibility for safeguarding global biodiversity.
They gathered at the Arnolfini complex in Bristol on UK on October 13th.
The debate replicated the style of the domestic BBC's successful Question-Time program. Four panelists were moderated by the UK Environment Minister, Rt Hon. Michael Meacher MP. Part of the Wildscreen festival, the debate hosted an audience of over 200 wildlife film producers and cameramen who will quizzed the panelists. TVE filmed the two hour debate which was edited to a special 50 minute Earth Report program for initial broadcast on 21st October on BBC World TV to 170 countries.
The debate panel comprised of:
We are living at a time when we could see the end of nature. Increasingly we are divorced from a 'nature' that is in headlong retreat. Is this an indication of the poor performance of international conservation organizations, or simply a reflection of our powerlessness in the face of overwhelming global forces? At a time when we can clone new species, does this really matter? Will science and technology enable humans to live divorced from nature? And even if nature does matter to human survival, what realistically can be done to save the great diversity of species that accompany us on this planet? These and other issues were the core of the spirited debate which included much discussion on local sustainable development as well as a more global perspective on conservation.
Edited highlights of the BBC/TVE Earth Report millennial debate were broadcast on BBC World on: Saturday, 21st October, at 1810 GMT, and Sunday, 22nd October, at 0810 GMT and 1210 GMT.
Information on how to order copies of this debate can be found from the Earth Report website.
-- Robert Lamb
The World Music and Dance global concert tour 2001-2002 will have the theme of biodiversity for IBOY. The tour will examine the influence of biodiversity on culture through music and dance, and invited lecturers will speak on key biodiversity issues. The tour will reach a young global audience that are not traditionally exposed to information on biodiversity.
--Ivan Hattingh
Last updated December 4, 2002
IBOY took place during 2001 and 2002 and is now completed. Information on the projects, activities and products that took place during IBOY are available on these pages. Many of the projects are still continuing their research and education activities and links to their homepages can be found on the project pages.
For more information on on-going activities of IBOY's parent organization, DIVERSITAS, see http://www.icsu.org/DIVERSITAS
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