Abstract
Biodiversity assessment has been the focus of intense debate and conceptual and methodological advances in recent years. The cultural, academic and aesthetic impulses to recognise and catalogue the diversity in our surroundings, in this case of living objects, is furthermore propelled by the urgency of understanding that we may be responsible for a dramatic reduction of biodiversity, comparable in magnitude to geological mass extinctions. One of the most important advances in this attempt to characterise biodiversity has been incorporating DNA-based characters and molecular taxonomy tools to achieve faster and more efficient species delimitation and identification, even in hyperdiverse tropical biomes. In this assay we advocate for a broad understanding of Biodiversity as the inventory of species in a given environment, but also the diversity of their interactions, with both aspects being attainable using molecular markers and phylogenetic approaches. We exemplify the suitability and utility of this framework for large-scale biodiversity assessment with the results of our ongoing projects trying to characterise the communities of leaf beetles and their host plants in several tropical setups. Moreover, we propose that approaches similar to ours, establishing the inventories of two ecologically inter-related and species-rich groups of organisms, such as insect herbivores and their angiosperm host-plants, can serve as the foundational stone to anchor a comprehensive assessment of diversity, also in tropical environments, by subsequent addition of trophic levels.
Highlights
An all-encompassing view on BiodiversityFew unifying concepts in Biology are so well established and ingrained in scientific and popular thinking as Biodiversity (Wilson 1988)
This is essentially the diversity of ways in which life forms can interact, an aspect of biodiversity traditionally approached from Ecology, with a boost in recent times thanks to the progress made in the field of community ecology
When the emphasis of biodiversity assessment focuses on the inventorying angle, this ‘simplified’ view on biodiversity is generally restricted by taxonomic expertise, sampling techniques, budgetary limitations, but most of all by the sheer diversity of life forms that even the most simple biomes can harbour
Summary
Few unifying concepts in Biology are so well established and ingrained in scientific and popular thinking as Biodiversity (Wilson 1988). The most intuitive idea of biodiversity has its roots in the enlightened and encyclopaedic inventorying efforts that propelled the voyages of discovery in the XVIIIth Century to collect and catalogue animals, plants and minerals all over the Globe This inventorying urge promoted in turn the creation of Museums, Zoos and Botanical Gardens in developed countries, places to keep and share with the public the records of the catalogue (institutions still reputed and alive and experimenting today a renaissance of that cataloguing spirit). Following this tradition, the word biodiversity evokes a display of life forms, or a list or catalogue of species names, ideally ranked following some system. These cataloguing and integrative scopes take on their highest relevance when biodiversity assessment is coupled with conservation initiatives, which ideally aim at preserving the nominal diversity of life forms but vitally the processes that sustain them too
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