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201222Jul16:08

What We Know and Don’t Know About Earth’s Miss­ing Biodiversity

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 22 July 2012 | mod­i­fied 05 Decem­ber 2012
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Most of the world’s species are still unknown to sci­ence although many researchers grap­pled to address the ques­tion of how many species there are on Earth over the recent decades.

Esti­mates of non-​microbial diver­sity on Earth pro­vided by researchers range from 2 mil­lion to over 50 mil­lion species, with great uncer­tain­ties in num­bers of insects, fungi, nema­todes, and deep-​sea organ­isms. Some groups of species, such as plants and birds, are well-​known, with sci­en­tists dis­cov­er­ing rel­a­tively few new ones each year. For insects and fungi, how­ever, it is almost impos­si­ble to guess how many unknown species there are.

These find­ings were revealed in a first-​ever study by researchers from the National Uni­ver­sity of Sin­ga­pore (NUS), James Cook Uni­ver­sity in Aus­tralia, Microsoft Research in the United King­dom and Duke Uni­ver­sity in the United States, and was first pub­lished in Trends in Ecol­ogy & Evo­lu­tion on 10 July 2012.

The researchers empha­sise the impor­tance of tech­nol­ogy such as DNA bar­cod­ing, new data­bases and crowd-​sourcing, that could greatly accel­er­ate the rate of species discovery.

Conus eating a fish

Unknown Bio­di­ver­sity: Estimates

In their study, Schef­fers and his col­leagues col­lated infor­ma­tion from numer­ous stud­ies that attempt to esti­mate num­bers and char­ac­ter­is­tics of unknown bio­di­ver­sity. What may seem like straight for­ward ques­tions about the Earth’s bio­di­ver­sity are “decep­tively com­plex”, warned the researchers.

What we do know, is that these unknown species are likely liv­ing in places where they are in dan­ger of extinc­tion, and that we could lose many before we realise how valu­able they are. The prob­lem is how one pro­tects an ani­mal that has never been seen. What we want to know is how many species there are, what they look like and where do they live.
Brett R. Schef­fers, lead-​author, Depart­ment of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences at NUS »

The report sug­gests that many of these species are impor­tant for med­i­cine, water purifi­ca­tion and pro­vide numer­ous other ser­vices for human­ity. For instance, a group of marine snails — the cone snail — is impor­tant for drug devel­op­ment rang­ing from pain killers to treat­ment of neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases. Many species of these snails are newly dis­cov­ered, and there is likely many more still wait­ing to be discovered.

We sim­ply can­not afford to lose these species because of neglect and short-​sided eco­nomic gains,” explained co-​author Pro­fes­sor William Lau­rance of James Cook Uni­ver­sity in Cairns, Australia.

Major Chal­lenges

The researchers pointed out major chal­lenges that com­pli­cate bio­di­ver­sity inven­tory. These include acci­den­tally assign­ing two dif­fer­ent species the same name, and ani­mals that look nearly iden­ti­cal and can there­fore only be iden­ti­fied by genetic analyses.

Miss­ing species will likely be hard to find, such as deep-​sea organ­isms, high moun­tain species or those species that live beneath the ground. Miss­ing bio­di­ver­sity will be small — both in body size and the amount of area that they live in. This is a con­cern as both of these fac­tors relate to a species vul­ner­a­bil­ity to envi­ron­men­tal disturbances.
(Lucas Joppa, co-​author, Microsoft Research, Cam­bridge, United Kingdom)

Advances in Technology

Although these chal­lenges present real strug­gles for future records, Schef­fers and his col­leagues stress that progress is being made. Novel tech­niques, such as DNA bar­cod­ing, new data­bases and crowd-​sourcing, could greatly accel­er­ate the rate of species discovery.

New tech­nolo­gies such as envi­ron­men­tal DNA analy­ses now exist and can detect a species’ pres­ence from mere water sam­ples with­out ever visu­ally observ­ing it,” said Schef­fers. “Data shar­ing tech­nolo­gies over the Inter­net about species loca­tions and dis­cov­er­ies are also expe­dit­ing and expand­ing the cat­a­logue of life.”

The above news item is reprinted from mate­ri­als avail­able at Sci­enceDaily. Orig­i­nal text may be edited for con­tent and length.

(Source: Sci­enceDaily, 17.07.2012)

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Goal: 7000 tigers in the wild

Tiger range countries map

Tiger map” (CC BY 2.5) by Sander­son et al., 2006.

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