Biodiversity Nexus: The Social Lives of Plants

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The Social Lives of Plants

A diverse assemblage of plants, like this one at Cedar Creek Natural

History Area, produces more vegetation and performs "ecosystem services" better.

One of the biggest joys of science comes when nature hands you a complete surprise.

It happened recently to two of the U's most prominent ecologists and their research colleagues, who uncovered the functional equivalent of social networks in ordinary grassland plants.

Those networks, destroyed when land is cleared for agriculture, hold hope for treating some of the world's biggest ecological ills. The existence of complex plant relationships leaped out from data on how high biodiversity—large numbers of species—boosted yields of vegetation and became even an even stronger force with time.

The two studies, led by Regents Professors David Tilman of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior and Peter Reich of the Department of Forest Resources, continue>>>

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Taking Action for Biodiversity

The world is now on a path to building a future of living in harmony with nature. In October 2010, in Japan, governments agreed to the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and the Aichi Targets as the basis for halting and eventually reversing the loss of biodiversity of the planet. To build support and momentum for this urgent task, the United Nations General Assembly at its 65th session declared the period 2011-2020 to be “the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity, with a view to contributing to the implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity for the period 2011-2020” (Resolution 65/161). The United Nations Decade on Biodiversity will serve to support the implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity and promote its overall vision of living in harmony with nature. Its goal is to mainstream biodiversity at different levels. Throughout the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity, governments are encouraged to develop, implement and communicate the results of national strategies for implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity. Each day counts. The actions taken by individuals, stakeholders and governments are important steps, one building on the other, towards protecting the life support systems that not only ensure human well-being, but support the rich variety of life on this planet.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions support fewer species. Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions. One estimate is that less than 1% of the species that have existed on Earth are extant (still in existence). Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity. The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity. The next 400 million years included repeated, massive biodiversity losses classified as mass extinction events. The Carboniferous, rainforest collapse. The Permian–Triassic extinction event, 251 million years ago, was the worst. The most recent, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, and has often attracted more attention than others because it resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs. The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts, particularly habitat destruction. Conversely, biodiversity impacts human health in a number of ways, both positively and negatively

What is a Biome?

A biome is a large geographical area of distinctive plant and animal groups, which are adapted to that particular environment. The climate and geography of a region determines what type of biome can exist in that region. Major biomes include deserts, forests, grasslands, tundra, and several types of aquatic environments. Each biome consists of many ecosystems whose communities have adapted to the small differences in climate and the environment inside the biome. All living things are closely related to their environment. Any change in one part of an environment, like an increase or decrease of a species of animal or plant, causes a ripple effect of change in through other parts of the environment.

Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms (plants, animals and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system. These components are regarded as linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. As ecosystems are defined by the network of interactions among organisms, and between organisms and their environment, they can come in any size but usually encompass specific, limited spaces (although it is sometimes said that the entire planet is an ecosystem). Ecosystems are controlled both by external and internal factors. External factors such as climate, the parent material which forms the soil and topography, control the overall structure an ecosystem and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem.

International Union for Conservation of Nature

He International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, Union internationale pour la conservation de la nature (UICN), in French) is an international organization dedicated to finding "pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges". The organization publishes the IUCN Red List, compiling information from a network of conservation organizations to rate which species are most endangered. The IUCN supports scientific research, manages field projects all over the world and brings governments, non-government organizations, United Nations agencies, companies and local communities together to develop and implement policy, laws and best practice. IUCN is the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network—a democratic membership union with more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations, and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries. IUCN’s work is supported by more than 1,000 professional staff in 60 offices and hundreds of partners in public, NGO and private sectors around the world. The Union’s headquarters are located in Gland, near Geneva, Switzerland. IUCN's stated vision is "a just world that values and conserves nature". Its mission is to "influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and biodiversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable".

The Biodiversity of the Rainforest

Why should the loss of tropical forests be of any concern to us in light of our own poor management of natural resources? The loss of tropical rainforests has a profound and devastating impact on the world because rainforests are so biologically diverse, more so than other ecosystems (e.g., temperate forests) on Earth. A single pond in Brazil can sustain a greater variety of fish than is found in all of Europe's rivers. A 25-acre plot of rainforest in Borneo may contain more than 700 species of trees - a number equal to the total tree diversity of North America. A single rainforest reserve in Peru is home to more species of birds than are found in the entire United States. One single tree in Peru was found to harbor forty-three different species of ants - a total that approximates the entire number of ant species in the British Isles. The number of species of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number found in the entire Atlantic Ocean. The biodiversity of the tropical rainforest is so immense that less than 1 percent of its millions of species have been studied by scientists for their active constituents and their possible uses. When an acre of topical rainforest is lost, the impact on the number of plant and animal species lost and their possible uses is staggering. Scientists estimate that we are losing more than 137 species of plants and animals eve

Marine Mammal Biodiversity

Species are not uniformly distributed on Earth. Heterogeneous physical features and community evolution drive the mix of species found in a given location. Places with high species diversity tend to contain greater genetic diversity and variety of physical habitats, as well as exhibiting greater resilience to environmental changes. Biological diversity, most commonly measured as the number of species present or species richness (versus number of genes or ecological habitats), provides an important composite measure of biological and ecological importance. Areas of high biological diversity, depending on their size and accessibility, may be identified either directly from intensive sampling or survey efforts. Alternatively, such hotspots of species richness may be inferred using habitat prediction models by overlaying a large number of predicted species occurrence data layers in a Geographic Information System (GIS) which will highlight areas of high co-occurrence of species. The vastness of the offshore marine environment and the resulting paucity of data for the open ocean or deep sea will likely preclude the identification of most areas of high biological diversity in the high seas through direct survey efforts alone in the foreseeable future. Thus large-scale species distribution models represent a useful alternative to evaluate the biological or ecological significance of an area based on this criterion by making inferences from better studied areas to those comparatively less well known

Biodiversity Nexus

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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The Social Lives of Plants

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