While often treated separately, biodiversity loss and climate change are related and mutually reinforcing problems. Rising temperatures and other climate impacts have seriously altered the composition, function, and structure of many ecosystems and species, some irreversibly. Policies to tackle both problems are clearly needed, but siloed approaches continue to dominate proposed solutions. There are also risks that some climate policies, such as the expansion of afforestation or bioenergy, will have increasingly negative risks on biodiversity. Integrated, innovative, and urgent solutions are needed in order to fulfill increasing calls for transformative change in how we live with nature.
In 2010, the international year of biodiversity, new policies for preserving biodiversity in Europe and worldwide will be developed as targets set by older policies, such as to halt biodiversity loss in the EU by 2010, were not met. This paper aims at sharing the expertise LERU's members harbour to set the right priorities for new biodiversity policies.
Introduction -- Biodiversity - Why it matters -- Biodiversity and climate change -- Inuit observations of changes in Artic biodiversity -- Tables: Inuit observations of changes in arctic biodiversity -- Health impacts of changes in arctic biodiversity -- Working for change -- Conclusion -- References
"This handbook provides a state-of-the-art, comprehensive overview of the expanding field of urban biodiversity. The field of urban biodiversity has emerged from within the broad discipline of urban ecology in the past two decades and is now a significant field in its own right. In view of this, the Routledge Handbook of Urban Biodiversity presents a thorough treatment of this field detailing the history of urban biodiversity, theoretical foundations, current state of knowledge, and application of that knowledge. The handbook is split into four parts: Part I: Setting the Stage for Urban Biodiversity Research and Practice Part II: Foundational Concepts and Theory in Urban Biodiversity Research Part III: Population and Community Ecology of Key Urban Taxa Part IV: Urban Biodiversity Practice: Management, Planning and Design for Healthy Communities This volume contains interdisciplinary and global contributions from established and early career academics as well as professionals and practitioners, addressing two key fields in urban biodiversity: fundamental research focused on answering questions about the mechanisms explaining the distribution of species among and within cities; and applied research and work by practitioners to address concerns about urban biodiversity conservation, restoration, planning, design, and public involvement. This handbook is essential reading for students, academics and professionals interested and working in the fields of urban biodiversity, ecology, nature conservation, urban planning, and landscape architecture"--
Biodiversity sciences, including taxonomy, are empirical sciences where all results are published in scholarly publications as part of the research life cycle. This creates a corpus of an estimated 500 million printed pages (Kalfatovic 2010) including billions of facts such as traits, biotic interactions, observations characterizing all the estimated 1.9 million known species (Costello et al. 2013). This library is continually reused, cited and extended, for example with more than an estimated 15,000–20,000 new species annually (Polaszek 2005). All of these figures are estimates because we neither know how many species have been discovered, nor how many are being discovered every day, let alone what we know about them. Following standard scientific practice, previous publications, specimens, gene sequences, or taxonomic treatments (Catapano 2019) are cited more or less explicitly. In the pre-digital age, these links were meant for the human reader to be understood. For example, "L. 1758" is an established reference and links to both, Carolus Linnaeus and Linnaeus 1758, understandable at least by an expert human, and in the digital age, provides access to the respective digital representation. These data within the hundreds of millions of printed and now increasingly digitally published pages form a seamless, albeit implicit knowledge graph. Unfortunately, most of these publications are in print—the Biodiversity Heritage Library digitized about 50 million pages (Kalfatovic 2010)—or in many cases, closed access publications, and thus this knowledge is not readily accessible in the digital age.However, in today's digital age, each of these kinds of implicit links is an expensive stumbling block to access and reuse of the referenced data, its parent publications and the cited referenced data therein. Inadequate formats, language and access to taxonomic information were already recognized in 1992 at the Rio Summit (Taxonomic Impediment). The consequences of these impediments are only now obvious with the realization of the daunting amount of human resources needed to digitally catalogue and index this unknown (not discoverable and inaccessible) known knowledge, let alone making the data itself findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). This is a formidable and complex scientific challenge.Plazi is taking on this challenge. Its vision is to promote and enable the discovery and liberation of data to transform the unknown known data into digitally accessible knowledge, i.e., to build a digital knowledge base aimed at discovering all the species (and other taxa) we know, and what we know about them. Taxonomic publications with their highly standardized taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, treatment citations, material citations and illustrations are well suited to machine extraction. Together they include the entire catalogue of life with all the discovered species and their synonyms, often tens to hundreds of treatments, and figures that depict the myriad forms that comprise the world's biodiversity. Once these data are FAIR, it allows bidirectional linking, for example of taxonomic names to the referenced taxonomic treatment, other digital resources such as gene sequences or digital specimens. At the same time, each datum is an entry point to the wealth of information that can be followed by the human user by clicking the links, but more importantly, analysed by machines. Here, digitally accessible knowledge will be defined in the context of discovering known biodiversity, including strategies of how to approach the challenge, which then will be detailed in subsequent talks in this symposium. This symposium is based on Plazi's ongoing data liberation and discovery supported by the European Union (e.g. Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library BiCIKL), United States (e.g. NIH) and Swiss research funding (e.g. e-BioDiv and the Arcadia Fund), collaboration with publishers (e.g. Pensoft, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities Publications, the Zenodo repository, Biodiversity Heritage Library), and data reusers like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Ocellus, Synospecies and openBiodiv. Currently, over 500,000 taxonomic treatments and 300,000 illustrations have been liberated and are accessible through TreatmentBank and the Biodiversity Literature Repository.
Giakoumi, Sylvaine . et al.-- 9 pages, 4 figures, supporting information https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12586 ; Terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems are connected via multiple biophysical and ecological processes. Identifying and quantifying links among ecosystems is necessary for the uptake of integrated conservation actions across realms. Such actions are particularly important for species using habitats in more than one realm during their daily or life cycle. We reviewed information on the habitats of 2,408 species of European conservation concern and found that 30% of the species use habitats in multiple realms. Transportation and service corridors, which fragment species habitats, were identified as the most important threat impacting ∼70% of the species. We examined information on 1,567 European Union (EU) conservation projects funded over the past 25 years, to assess the adequacy of efforts toward the conservation of "multi‐realm" species at a continental scale. We discovered that less than a third of multi‐realm species benefited from projects that included conservation actions across multiple realms. To achieve the EU's conservation target of halting biodiversity loss by 2020 and effectively protect multi‐realm species, integrated conservation efforts across realms should be reinforced by: (1) recognizing the need for integrated management at a policy level, (2) revising conservation funding priorities across realms, and (3) implementing integrated land‐freshwater‐sea conservation planning and management ; This article is based upon work from the COST Action 15121 "Advancing marine conservation in the European and contiguous seas (MarCons)" (Katsanevakis et al., 2017) supported by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology. SBC was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through a post‐doctoral grant (SFRH/BPD/74423/2010) ; Peer Reviewed
Using a species list from the American Southwest, author Mitch Tobin examines the Endangered Species Act on what it has accomplished, where it has failed, and how it could be better.--[book jacket].
B. Chimed‐Ochir is Head of the Project Office, World Wide Fund for Nature, in Ulaanbaatar. He has worked for a variety of other agencies associated with biodiversity and environmental protection.
AbstractThis article provides a brief overview of biodiversity on military lands, highlights a number of biodiversity conservation success stories that serve as models for aspects of an ecosystem‐based natural resource management approach, and offers perspectives on conditions for the broader implementation of ecosystem management approaches by the Department of Defense (DOD).
The 5-year EU project project Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales (SCALES) has come to an end in July 2014 resulting in a first of its kind description of challenges that arise in protecting biodiversity across different scales. A wide range of practical methods and recommendations to improve conservation at regional, national and supranational scales are included in a book published as a synthesis of project outcome. The book "Scaling in Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation" was published in open access via Pensoft Publisher's Advanced Books platform. Results are also presented in an easy to use interactive SCALETOOL, specifically developed for the needs of policy and decision-makers. The tool also provides access to a range of biodiversity data and driver maps compiled or created in the project.
AbstractThis Afterword to The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review discusses (i) the ideas in the Review that have been accepted readily by decision makers and are being put into operation, (ii) those that have been accepted but are judged by decision makers to be unworkable in the contemporary climate, (iii) those that are seen as politically too sensitive even to acknowledge in public.
