Showing papers on "Aquatic biodiversity research published in 2007"

Identification and Gap Analysis of Key Biodiversity Areas: Targets for Comprehensive Protected Area Systems

Abstract: Important Bird Areas and Important Plant Areas have already been identified in more than 170 countries. The Key Biodiversity Areas approach builds on the work done to date, in order to provide practical guidance to governments in identifying those sites which must be protected to ensure the future of both biodiversity and humanity.

Biodiversity and biogeography

Abstract: As we have seen, life has been important in shaping its own environment throughout its 3.8 Ga* geologically recorded history. It has influenced earth-surface temperatures (Classes 2, 9, 10) through its involvement in the geochemical cycles that determine the world ocean’s salt content and the atmosphere’s composition (Classes 7-10). Overall, life’s effects have tended to compensate for the thermal effects of various changes in the sunlight dose (Classes 2, 6, 9). Life may well have been the key element that, so far at least, has kept the Earth from entering a runaway-greenhouse phase, as Venus and Mars seem to have done (Class 2), and perhaps also in keeping the surface temperatures low enough that the lithosphere could stay geologically alive and actively involved in convective cooling of the planet’s deep interior, as seems not to have happened on Mars and Venus (Classes 3, 4). But how have plate tectonics, continental drift, and the Earth’s convective cooling affected life’s evolution? Class 4 asked why there are so many tectonic plates. Now it is time to ask why there so many kinds of organisms, how the changing configuration of continents and oceans has affected biodiversity, and how we humans can plan most wisely to conserve that diversity for coming generations.

Biocomplexity and conservation of biodiversity hotspots: three case studies from the Americas.

Abstract: The perspective of ‘biocomplexity’ in the form of ‘coupled natural and human systems’ represents a resource for the future conservation of biodiversity hotspots in three direct ways: (i) modelling the impact on biodiversity of private land-use decisions and public land-use policies, (ii) indicating how the biocultural history of a biodiversity hotspot may be a resource for its future conservation, and (iii) identifying and deploying the nodes of both the material and psycho-spiritual connectivity between human and natural systems in service to conservation goals. Three biocomplexity case studies of areas notable for their biodiversity, selected for their variability along a latitudinal climate gradient and a human-impact gradient, are developed: the Big Thicket in southeast Texas, the Upper Botanamo River Basin in eastern Venezuela, and the Cape Horn Archipelago at the austral tip of Chile. More deeply, the biocomplexity perspective reveals alternative ways of understanding biodiversity itself, because it directs attention to the human concepts through which biodiversity is perceived and understood. The very meaning of biodiversity is contestable and varies according to the cognitive lenses through which it is perceived.

Ecomanagement of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the Mediterranean Sea: concerns and strategies

Abstract: Marine biodiversity is generally higher in benthic than in pelagic systems, and in coastal than in open sea systems. Sediments are the most human-impacted domain and therefore represent the target zone for both the study and actions needed for the preservation of biodiversity. Losses of marine diversity, higher (or simply more evident) in coastal areas, are generally the result of conflicting uses of coastal habitats. Large difficulties arise from the analysis and evaluation of the actual biodiversity, especially when different environments are compared, as often studies on biodiversity are dependent upon the distribution of the specialists. On the other hand, losses of marine biodiversity might be underestimated, due to the limited knowledge of the ecosystems’ functioning, of the species inhabiting various habitats and of the still limited capacity to assess microbial biodiversity, which represents the largest fraction of the global marine biodiversity. Finally, claimed losses of biodiversity might be ju...

Trends in biodiversity in Europe and the impact of land use change

Abstract: The loss of biodiversity in Europe and elsewhere has been highlighted for several decades. The scale and potential consequences of this loss has led to action to combat it, notably the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Realising that current policies and action taken to conserve biodiversity were inadequate, the European Union at its 2001 summit meeting in Goteborg, Sweden, set the ambitious target to ‘‘protect and restore habitats and natural systems and halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010’’. A similar target was set by the CBD in 2002 ‘‘to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss’’ and endorsed by the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002. In this chapter, we discuss the available data on the loss of biodiversity in Europe, the probable causes of this loss, future threats to biodiversity, the policy response to these threats and recent research on measuring trends in biodiversity, with particular emphasis on detecting the impact of one major threat to biodiversity, change in land use. Nigel Boatman et al. present additional related and complementary material in Chapter 1 of this volume, with particular emphasis on farmland in the UK.

From ecological diversity to biodiversity

Abstract: INTRODUCTION During the last three decades, biodiversity conservation has emerged as a central focus of environmental concern in many regions of the world (Sarkar 2005). As a result, large-scale efforts are being devoted to devising systematic protocols for conservation, sometimes involving computational efforts unprecedented in ecology (Margules and Pressey 2000). These efforts presume that a sufficiently precise concept of biodiversity is at hand. Some philosophical attention has also been focused on elaborating an adequate normative basis for conservation. These attempted normative justifications for biodiversity conservation also depend on what is meant by biodiversity. Yet, “biodiversity” remains a contested term. The term “biodiversity” was first used in 1986 as a contraction for “biological diversity” by Walter G. Rosen while planning for a (U.S.) National Forum on Biodiversity (Takacs 1996). Subsequently, temporarily mutated as “BioDiversity,” it was used as the title for the proceedings from that meeting (Wilson 1988). No attempt was made to define the term precisely, even as its use spread - the chronology in Table 21.1 includes the most salient episodes. Conservation biology also emerged as a distinct interdisciplinary research area during the 1980s with its central aim the protection of biodiversity (Takacs 1996, Sarkar 2002, 2005).

Biodiversity conservation including uncharismatic species

Abstract: and priorities (Redford et al. 2003; Lamoreux et al. 2006; Rodrı́guez et al. 2006), the current status of biodiversity (Loreau et al. 2006), the obligations of conservation biologists regarding management policies (Chapron 2006; Schwartz 2006), and the main threats to biodiversity (including invasive species) (Bawa 2006). I suggest, however, that these articles do not really deal with biodiversity. Rather, they all focus on a few obviously charismatic groups (mammals, birds, some plants, fishes, human culture). Mammals and birds have traditionally been proposed as umbrella or flagship species (‘‘species that needs such large tracts of habitat that saving it will automatically save many other species’’––Simberloff 1998), to identify areas suitable as nature reserves (Kerr 1997; Sergio et al. 2005). In the following I give an example where the strategy of using umbrella species (normally a charismatic large vertebrate) can fail in the conservation of many uncharismatic groups and endemic species. It is recognized that the systematic and conservation status of invertebrates are not well documented, and that yet they are in more severe danger than other groups in nature. As the World Conservation Union (IUCN) indicates: ‘‘Most animal species in nature are invertebrates, and the overwhelming majority of threatened species are likely to be invertebrates. But very little has been assessed on this group to infer about its conservation status’’. More specifically, aquatic invertebrates merit special interest and attention. One particular problem here is that, following human assisted invasion of an exotic species between continents, a natural method of dispersion by waterbirds (Figuerola et al. 2005) (that may themselves be threatened and protected species) can lead to a rapid invasion of an entire continent. This rapid spread with controversial ecological effects has been reported even in other groups (Phillips and Shine 2004). In the example case, if one protected waterbird species, for instance the flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber roseus) or the shelduck (Tadorna tadorna), that acts as dispersal

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Transitional Waters; the point of view of a microbial ecologist

Abstract: 1 - The study of biodiversity of prokaryotes in transitional waters is hampered by the fact that we do not posses any comprehensive inventories of prokaryotic species. Microbial biodiversity is thus often estimated indirectly by extraction of nucleic acids from the natural environment and by using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences as phylogenetic and taxonomic markers. Experimental microbial ecology has contributed over the years to developing niche-assembly theories of community assemblage and I review some of their major findings. Finally, the aim of establishing a link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is quite recent and has prompted a novel experimental approach that can be applied in microbial ecology. The following observations have been forwarded. 2 - The species richness for prokaryotes is difficult to assess in transitional waters, because of an unclearly defined species concept and because the Bacteriological Code requires living cultures as type strains for taxonomic descriptions; therefore, the number of validly described prokaryote species is still very limited (i.e. currently less than 10,000). 3 - The major emphasis on niche assembly theories in microbial ecology is a consequence of the paradigm "everything is everywhere, but the environment selects" quoted by Baas Becking in 1934. Hence, insights on how competition mechanisms can contribute to sustaining microbial biodiversity in relatively homogeneous model systems have tremendously increased during the last decade. Nevertheless, I argue that coastal lagoons and other transitional waters are environments characterised by strong exchanges with adjacent local microbial communities, where community assemblage may be strongly impacted by dispersal processes. 4 - The study of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is based on quantifying a process rate or a yield (the ecosystem function) as a function of a manipulated biodiversity in an artificial community. A positive relation between biodiversity and ecosystem function has been explained by 1) sampling effect (i.e. a higher biodiversity correlates with a higher chance of providing a home for the most productive species), 2) more efficient resource exploitation for species showing complementary niche differentiation. I argue that synergistic phenomena due to positive interactions among species may also play an important role.

Strategic studies on the biodiversity sustainability in Yunnan Province, Southwest China

Abstract: With an area of 394,000 km2 (4.1% of China’s total area) and specific diversified geographical environments, Yunnan houses over 18,000 species of higher plants (51.6% of China’s total), 1,836 vertebrate species (54.8% of China’s total) and multitudinous species of rare, endemic and epibiotic wildlife, ranking first in species richness value and endemicity rate of China’s biodiversity, thus becoming a rare gene bank of wildlife species with the most concentrated distribution of important wildlife taxa and a key terrestrial biodiversity region of global significance. Despite its evident abundance and endemism, however, the biodiversity is faced with threats of ecological fragility and human disturbances in socioeconomic development resulting in attenuation of biodiversity, degradation of ecosystems and serious loss of species, thus, it needs to be carefully studied for its sustainability. Based on the analyses of the geographical diversity, the macro material bases of Yunnan’s biodiversity were reviewed and six characteristics of the provincial biodiversity were described in the ecosystems, forest types, species compositions, endemic species, genetic resources, etc. By appraising the present status of the provincial biodiversity conservation, the facts that the biodiversity coexisted with fragility were revealed so that eight key disadvantageous factors in the provincial ecological fragility causing serious biodiversity loss were summarized and described in this paper. In order to satisfy the two-fold needs of biodiversity sustainability and socioeconomic development, eight strategies for the sustainable development were intensively elaborated by borrowing certain theories in modern conservation biology, recycling economics and some successful innovations, and by giving comprehensive consideration to the ecological fragility mechanism, nature reserve construction, environmental protection and the exploitability of resources for biodiversity sustainability and socioeconomic development. Accordingly, relevant targets, principles, tactics and measures for effective biodiversity conservation and sustainability were suggested to lay a solid theoretical foundation and reliable scientific basis for the biodiversity and socioeconomic sustainable development.