First post

Welcome to the blog!

Something that has interested me throughout my undergraduate studies is the concept of biodiversity – its global patterns and how we can track its changes, the way that species interact in a complex ecosystem, and what we can do to ultimately stop the unnecessary loss of biodiversity attributed to human action (I know, a bit idealistic perhaps).

We may be in what the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) is calling the ‘Decade on diversity’ but statistics seem to be pointing to anything but, with wildlife suffering more than ever from human activity. The CBD’s Aichi targets of 20 actions to be achieved by just over 3 years’ time set out desirable, but in my opinion unrealistic, goals to improve sustainability and prevent action that is leading to biodiversity loss. There is motivation to save biodiversity, but I’m sceptical as to whether this is something that can be achieved under current climate change predictions.

As reported in the 2014 Living Planet Report, populations of vertebrate species have decreased by a staggering 52% in the last 40 years with freshwater species declining at an even more drastic 76%. Trends show little sign of slowing, the last 10 years causing us to say goodbye to 2 million km2 of forest land (Hansen et al, 2013). So there can be little doubt that a drastic change is taking place.

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Mass extinctions (a loss of more than ¾ of species in a short (at least geologically speaking) time period) are nothing new in the Earth’s history – we’ve had 5 with the most recent finishing approximately 65,000,000 years ago. But studies such as Barnosky et al 2011 suggest that we are experiencing a 6^th, with species losses at a higher rate than they should be according to fossil data. As Barnosky et al. discuss, extinction is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, except for when it happens as rapidly and at such a high level as it is today. We are drastically changing the environment at a rate that precludes the potential for species to recover, evolve and keep up with the changes in climate.

Hopefully, this blog will manage to explore these concepts in more depth and look at what the future prospects are for global biodiversity and answer some questions that have been playing on my mind for a while – how likely is it that we can slow down the rate of biodiversity loss and extinction, and what exactly will the consequences be if we don’t?