Biodiverse Research Articles

Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents: Potential Hot Spots for Natural Products Discovery?

Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are among the most extreme and dynamic environments on Earth. However, islands of highly dense and biologically diverse communities exist in the immediate vicinity of hydrothermal vent flows, in stark contrast to the surrounding bare seafloor. These communities comprise organisms with distinct metabolisms based on chemosynthesis and growth rates comparable to those from shallow water tropical environments, which have been rich sources of biologically active natural products. The geological setting and geochemical nature of deep-sea vents that impact the biogeography of vent organisms, chemosynthesis, and the known biological and metabolic diversity of Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea, including the handful of natural products isolated to date from deep-sea vent organisms, are considered here in an assessment of deep-sea hydrothermal vents as potential hot spots for natural products investigations. Of critical importance too are the logistics of collecting deep vent organisms, opportunities for re-collection considering the stability and longevity of vent sites, and the ability to culture natural product-producing deep vent organisms in the laboratory. New cost-effective technologies in deep-sea research and more advanced molecular techniques aimed at screening a more inclusive genetic assembly are poised to accelerate natural product discoveries from these microbial diversity hot spots.

Finding Common Ground: Birds, Biodiversity, and the Implications for Collaboration with Traditional Landowners in New Guinea

It has been proposed that indigenous societies can be models for the conservation of biodiversity. However, attempts at implementing conservation-based development plans are being judged failures. In this article, I argue that these failures can be addressed by translating indigenous knowledge into context that is mutually intelligible to both indigenous people and conservation biologists. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnobiological fieldwork, this article uses indigenous knowledge to describe the relationship of traditional life to biodiversity for the Hewa of Papua New Guinea's Central Range. The island of New Guinea is one of the planet's last bastions of cultural and biological diversity. Using birds as an indicator of diversity, I argue that more productive conservation policies will emerge when indigenous activities are viewed not as vehicles for establishing equilibrium with the environment, but as a source of ecological disturbance. Although Hewa traditions currently play a significant role in shaping this biologically diverse environment, their lifestyle is not necessarily a template for sustainability in the future.

DNA barcoding demystified

Only 10% of the earth’s biota has been described despite250 yearsoftaxonomicresearch(Wilson2000).Thisisinlargepart a reflection of the extent and complexity of biologicaldiversity,butitisalsotruethattraditionaltaxonomictechniquesare labourious and highly specialised, and taxonomic expertiseis very thinly spread across the myriad groups of life (Scotland

Managing riverine environments in the context of new water policy in Europe

Natural riverine environments are dynamic, and often highly productive, biologically diverse ecosystems. Throughout history human communities have endeavoured to harness the benefits they can provide, but their development largely has ignored the multi‐functional nature of these benefits. This has been the result, in part at least, of a segmented and sectoral view of landscape elements which in reality work as an integrated system. The impact has been so great, especially during the last 200 years, that today almost all the large rivers in Europe are to some degree regulated. The uncoupling of rivers from their genetic functional landscape has been enabled and encouraged by inappropriate and non‐integrated policy mechanisms such as the Common Agricultural Policy. However, a new management and policy framework is developing out of two parallel initiatives which can become linked to form a powerful engine for change. These are the Water Framework Directive, originating out of Brussels, and the Ecosystem Approach, originating from the Convention on Biological Diversity. A key task for the scientific community now is to help develop the rationale, tools and approach which will support these initiatives and enable innovative policies and decision‐makers re‐establish the functional linkages which underpin the sustainable use of river catchments.

Invited commentary

Invited commentary

Miguel Alvarez del Toro: First and Last of a Kind

Once in a blue moon an extraordinarily gifted naturalist and visionary conservationist finds his or her way to an incredibly biologically diverse region of the world, still in a nearly pristine state. It is even rarer when the person decides to stay there and to devote his or her entire life to studying the natural resources of that region, communicating findings to scientists and the public, and tirelessly promoting biological conservation. This is precisely what happened more than 50 years ago. The place was Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, and the person was Professor Miguel Alvarez del Toro. The appropriate, committed person arrived at the right place at the right time. If he had not, we would know a lot less about the incomparable biological diversity of the region and we would not have as much of it left as we do today. He was one of the last of the all-around naturalists and the first of Mexico's modern conservationists.

Implementing biodiversity conservation through the British Columbia Forest Practices Code

The Canadian province of British Columbia supports a diverse biota, including a significant proportion of the planet's temperate forests and the majority of coastal temperate forests of western North America. The majority (81%) of land is under provincial jurisdiction and classified as crown provincial land. Productive forest land contributing to the allowable annual forest cut represents 45% of the provincial land base or 43.3 million hectares. Public awareness of biological diversity and understanding of the need for conservation has greatly increased in recent years and has led to the creation of a policy to double the amount of protected area in the province from 6% to 12% of the land base by the year 2000. This paper describes the Forest Practices Code which came into effect on June 15 1995 and is intended to help promote the conservation of biological diversity within the province. The development and effective implementation of the Code is significant and of wide interest to forest and land managers because it applies to all crown lands outside of protected areas. Biodiversity conservation is addressed in the Code by way of landscape and forest stand level planning. Landscape level planning begins with the establishment of a landscape unit. These units are based on ecological boundaries, watersheds or groups of watersheds rather than administrative boundaries and may encompass public and private land. They range in area from around 5000 to 100 000 hectares in which the future desired forest conditions can be spatially planned. There are three guidebooks that are intended to be used together to provide a coordinated strategy for the conservation of biological diversity under the Code: the Riparian Management Guidebook (British Columbia Forest Service and British Columbia Environment, 1995c), the Managing Identified Wildlife Guidebook (British Columbia Forest Service and British Columbia Environment, 1995d) and the Biodiversity Guidebook (British Columbia Forest Service and British Columbia Environment, 1995b). The Biodiversity Guidebook provides a ‘coarse filter’ for retention of habitat diversity. The riparian management reserves and management zones provide protection to the large number of species associated with those restricted, but biologically diverse and productive, habitats. There are also provisions in the Code for managing habitats for single species, subspecies, and ecosystems known to be threatened, endangered or regionally important. The Forest Practices Code truly signals a major change in forest management within British Columbia. The retention of old growth forest and mature forests for biodiversity is a new practice. The science behind the recommendations in the biodiversity guidelines must be monitored to evaluate whether forest practices are effective at meeting their conservation objectives.

Purines - biological diversity leads to many potential uses

Investigators from a variety of disciplines share a common thread to their research: the study of purines. This biologically diverse class is potentially useful in cardiovascular, neurological and endocrine diseases. The current state-of-play in each of these therapeutic areas was discussed at the 12th International Congress of Pharmacology [IUPHAR; Montreal, Canada; July 1994].

The Macroeconomics of a Steady State

The Macroeconomics of a Steady State Surprisingly little has been said by economists about the macroeconomics of modern environmental problems. Although such problems are seen by most economists as fundamentally microeconomic, there are dissenters. Herman Daly's (1991a; 1991b) formulation of a steady state economy is in response to what he sees as a macroeconomic environmental problem of crisis proportions. The essence of his view is that the scale of the global macroeconomy is dangerously out of sync with the scale of the global environment. While he argues that scale is the essential macroeconomic problem (Daly, 1991b), neither he nor others have explored in detail the macroeconomic consequences of a steady state. How does the fundamentally cyclical character of macroeconomic activity square with the notion of a steady state? What are the consequences of a steady state for macroeconomic policy? Is a steady state even consistent with a growth prone economy based on capitalist forms of business organization? The goal of this paper is to begin the task of addressing these and other issues related to the macroeconomics of a steady state. The Concept of a Steady State Since others, Daly (1991a) in particular, have argued eloquently for the ultimate necessity of a steady state economy, only limited attention will be given here to its justification.(1) The fundamental premise of a steady state economy is that the first and second laws of thermodynamics dictate an absolute scarcity of natural resources. Energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and the quality of energy and matter deteriorate with use (Georgescu-Roegen, 1973; 1977; Daly, 1991a, pp. 14-16, 18-27; 1990). While capital and labor are ready substitutes for one another, their substitutability for resource flows is more limited (Georgescu-Roegen, 1984). As Daly (1991b, pp. 204-5) puts it, the task of the capital and labor stock is to transform a flow of energy and matter from nature into finished goods, and because the role of the transformer and transformed are so fundamentally different, one cannot be easily substituted for the other. Although improvements in the efficiency of energy and materials use and recycling are possibilities, energy and materials inputs cannot be assymtotically driven toward zero by substitution with labor and capital as implied by neoclassical production theory. Scarcity of energy and matter is not just a relative one solvable through substitution; it is absolute (Daly, 1985). Moreover, because solar energy and matter are fixed in terms of maximum availability at a global level, ecosystems on a global scale are limited in their capacity for biological production and nutrient recycling (Daly, 1990). Ecosystems thus have a limited capacity to provide a variety of important services to human societies -- including materials and energy supplies, waste absorption and recycling, water supply through the hydrological cycle, crop pollination, production of soils, local and global climatic stability and atmospheric gas balances, biological diversity, and opportunities for a variety of human experiences in a biologically diverse natural world (Ehrlich, 1989). To generalize, the economy is an open subsystem contained within and dependent upon a closed global ecosystem fixed in scale (Daly, 1992, pp. 186-87). Continuous global economic growth as presently constituted is on a collision course with absolute scarcity. Given that economic growth requires increasing flows of energy, materials, and ecosystem services, at some point in time upper limits on these flows will be reached. Moreover, given the propensity of economic agents to ignore the social costs of irreversible ecosystem destruction, as economic growth proceeds the capacity of ecosystems to provide services diminishes, and given the limits to recycling imposed by entropy, the capacity of the global environment to supply continuous flows of nonrenewable materials also diminishes. …

Genetic concepts for habitat conservation: the transfer and maintenance of genetic variation

The urgent need to integrate evolutionary theory into applied habitat management and land-use planning endeavors has become a focus for much conservation and biodiversity related research. Only recently have scientists begun to incorporate a holistic ecosystem approach, focusing on relationships among plant and animal resources rather than on individual species, into their management philosophies. Swept up in these emerging efforts to sustain biological diversity and functional ecosystems, genetic concepts have been incorporated into habitat management with an alarming mixture of excellence, generalization, and unfortunately even misconception. This does not imply that evolutionary theory has no bearing on the applied sciences but rather that more attention must be given to the interface between theoretical and applied research. The need to integrate genetic theory into ongoing conservation and management efforts is clear; however, much controversy remains as to how this integration may be accomplished for individual management situations. For vertebrates, the transfer of genetic information between generations or within and among various breeding components of populations is inextricably linked to the ecosystem in which they exist. Changes in the structure of an ecosystem can and must influence the ecology of its component species to some extent. However, genetic consequences resulting from changes in the ecology of species or species complexes are not clearly understood. Undoubtedly, alterations in the transfer and conservation of genetic information occur concomitantly with large-scale changes in the landscape. It is likely that these small undetected changes at the genetic level impact species to a similar extent as larger more obvious landscape level factors. In this work we will discuss concepts that are integral to the long-term existence of organisms in managed landscapes and to maintenance of gene diversity in general. Specifically, we will focus on the concept of effective population size, confusion associated with this concept, and its applicability to the maintenance of biologically diverse and sustainable landscapes.

Evolutionary and Political Economic Influences On Biological Diversity in African Americans

African American are among the most biologically diverse groups in the world, deriving the bulk their genetic inheritance from Africa, the most tropical of the world's continents, the continent regarded as the ancestral homeland of the genus Homo, the geographical region of longest human habitation, and the point of origin for the oldest anatomically modem human groups. Yet African American biological variation is also a product of the great Atlantic Diaspora, a movement that was initiated with the social and economic disruptions in Africa preceding the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved African peoples and includes the forced march of prisoners of war to the sea for transport, the dynamics of the horrific Middle Passage and the seasoning process, and the biological and biocultural readjustments of Africans to enslavement in the Americas. African American human biology has been significantly shaped by selective pressures emanating from the unique and particularly adverse social, economic, and political conditions of this historical lifeworld. These selective constraints have molded the pronounced inherent variation of the ancestral African gene pool, which has also been modified by varying degrees of gene flow (i.e., admixture)

Perspectives and Processes in Revegetation of Arid and Semiarid Rangelands

Range revegetation research has been dominated by empirical studies that provide some information about what works or does not work under a given set of conditions, but tell us little or nothing about the underlying ecological processes. Research has emphasized the establishment of vigorous exotic grasses on specific sites rather than the establishment of persistent, biologically diverse plant communities. A more mechanistic research approach is needed to better understand factors governing germination, seedling establishment, and plant community development in natural and synthetic systems to guide revegetation toward biological diversity. This paper evaluates selected aspects of the present knowledge of revegetation science on arid and semiarid lands, and attempts to identify areas for future research direction. Specific concepts and aspects of succession and plant community development, such as seedbed ecology, temporal and spatial patterns of resource availability and use, species life history traits, and species interactions are important areas of research. Continuous measurement of detailed environmental and biological data at the appropriate scale (down to the size of small seeds) will allow development of mechanistic models which can be used to predict plant establishment and community development for different environmental conditions.