Difference between revisions of "Category:Bio-diversity"
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| + | Bio-diversity refers to total number and variety of species in an ecosystem, biome or on the planet as a whole. Many environmental issues have an adverse effect on biodiversity. | ||
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See also [http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php?title=Category:Wildlife Wildlife], [http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Category:Forests Forests], as well as [http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Category:Global_Warming Global Warming] | See also [http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php?title=Category:Wildlife Wildlife], [http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Category:Forests Forests], as well as [http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Category:Global_Warming Global Warming] | ||
Revision as of 22:17, 28 October 2012
Bio-diversity refers to total number and variety of species in an ecosystem, biome or on the planet as a whole. Many environmental issues have an adverse effect on biodiversity.
See also Wildlife, Forests, as well as Global Warming
Contents
Background
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species The United Nations has designated 2010 the year of biodiversity, in a bid to turn around the rapid loss of the worlds various plant and animal species. The latest data from scientists indicates to us that the loss of species is occurring at anywhere between 100-1000 times faster than has traditionally been the case, about three per hour. Link to text and audio interview. 3/10 UN report on effects on medicine
Center for Biological Diversity.
The Atlas of Global Conservation is being published by UC Press and The Nature Conservancy on this day. Presented here at Google by The Nature Conservancy's Lead Scientist, Dr. M. Sanjayan (a Slug!).
The Global Biodiversity Outlook is the flagship publication of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Drawing on a range of information sources, including National Reports, biodiversity indicators information, scientific literature, and a study assessing biodiversity scenarios for the future, GBO-3 summarizes the latest data on status and trends of biodiversity and draws conclusions for the future strategy of the Convention.
Wildlife Conservation Society's, State of the Wild is a collection of evocative essays featuring emerging issues in the conservation of wildlife and wild places. current is 2008, we own 2006 S&E Stacks QL82 .S738 2005
Overview by Julia Whitty, " Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth's Vanishing Biodiversity" from MoJo.
A seminal study last fall in Nature put climate in perspective of 10 biophysical systems crucial to human health -- and it found biodiversity loss more troubling than any other Link.
"The Future of Bio-Diversity" Pimm et al.
"Planet of Weeds" by David Quammen.
News/Reports
Yale's Environment 360 has many great articles on bio-diversity, for example How humans are affected in unexpected ways by species loss.
Animal Lifeboats, zoos and biodiversity.
Prison Inmates Save Endangered Species. 9/12
A new report, America’s Hottest Species, highlights a variety of American wildlife that are currently threatened by climate change from a small bird to a coral reef to the world’s largest marine turtle. "Global warming is like a bulldozer shoving species, already on the brink of extinction, perilously closer to the edge of existence," said Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition which produced the report. "Polar bears, lynx, salmon, coral and many other endangered species are already feeling the heat." More
Mass Extinction website (extensive list of popular articles).
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (report download). Website
Midori biodiversity prizewinners announced.
Ten new species, including glowing mushrooms and jumping cockroaches. 5/11
Audio
Top Ten new species 5/12
Joe Roman, author of the new book, “Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act.” is interviewed here. Co-author of "Facing Extinction: Nine Steps to Save Biodiversity".
Books
A review of Watching, from the Edge of Extinction
Adams, Douglas. Best known for the amazing Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he also wrote Last Chance to See about endangered animals. Intro Ch. 1 password required. Author reading about Komodo dragon encounter. Warning, some animals were harmed in the production of this book ;) NEW! at UC talk based on Last Chance experiences. The BBC has done a new series in which Stephen Frye retraces the original journey. Here are some of the original radio dispatches.
Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. H2G2 website. The BBC is doing a new version with Stephen Frye; its website which may have some of the media from the original series.
Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Edited by Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein. 2008 Oxford
The End of the Wild By Stephen M. Meyer
Nature Out of Place By Jason Van Driesche on invasive species.
The Banana Slug Alice Bryant Harper. A Close Look at a Giant Forest Slug of Western North America. Available at the Baytree Bookstore. Article
Monster of God What this world needs," opined the nature writer David Quammen in a 1984 column for Outside magazine, "is a good vicious 60-foot-long Amazon snake." He was kidding, thankfully; the rest of the column goes on to describe the human tendency to massively exaggerate the size of anacondas in the Amazon. Now, though, 19 years later, Quammen has written Monster of God, a book arguing that precisely what the world does need is very large, very predatory animals. In his last book, The Song of the Dodo, Quammen managed to turn the arcane field of island biogeography into a best-selling page-turner; in Monster of God, he reverses the trick, transforming stories of man-eating tigers and 20-foot crocodiles from tabloid perennials into a thoughtful exploration of the ecological and psychological roles of the beasts that eat us whole review.
Ghost Bears by UCSC people.
Images
New species found in Southeast Asia, but also a region in trouble.
Video
PBS Nature (full episodes online) list by species.
PBS Newshour has significant environmental coverage, including invasive mussels.
Banana Slugs unpeeled (video).
E.O Wilson, brilliant researcher and teacher, TEDtalk video is working on an Encyclopedia of Life
Rachel Sussman is on a quest to celebrate the resilience of life by identifying and photographing continuous-living organisms that are 2,000 years or older, all around the world. TEDtalk.
Dmitry Lisitsyn fought to protect Sakhalin Island's critical endangered ecosystems while also demanding safety measures from one of the world's largest petroleum development projects. Learn more at Goldman Prize.
Jason Clay is a World Wildlife Fund vice-president who works with big corporations to transform the global markets they operate in, so we can produce more with less land, less water and less pollution. Convince just 100 key companies to go sustainable, and global markets will shift to protect the planet our consumption has already outgrown. TEDtalk
Will Wright, creator of SimCity will soon release Spore, a game for investigating complexity TEDtalk video.
Peter Ward argues that most of Earth's mass extinctions were caused by lowly bacteria. The culprit, a poison called hydrogen sulfide, may have an interesting application in medicine. TEDtalk video.
Adam Savage talks about his fascination with the dodo bird, and how it led him on a strange and surprising double quest. the host of "MythBusters" on the Discovery Channel, is a longtime special-effects artist and a minor obsessive.
Silence of the Bees PBS documentary on colony collapse syndrome. More Than Honey offers an extreme close-up of the life of bees. He films bees at a stunning micro level as they mate mid-air, emerge from cocoons and inject honey into honeycomb cells. He also visits beekeepers around the world and dispenses poetic perspectives on the nature of bees.
The varieties of wheat, corn and rice we grow today may not thrive in a future threatened by climate change. Cary Fowler takes us inside a vast global seed bank, buried within a frozen mountain in Norway, that stores a diverse group of food-crop for whatever tomorrow may bring. TEDtalk
Interactive/Maps
New Map of Life, interactive of 25K species.
Tree of Life species map.
Science for Citizens is searchable. Environmental projects. See also Citizen Science
Encyclopedia of Life is an online, collaborative project where you can learn about any species on Earth, as well as contribute information and submit photos. This global initiative seeks to create an "infinitely expandable" resource for all of our planet’s 1.9 million known species. Encyclopedia of Life and a video tour.
Wildlife Watch allows you to input data and see results of others
Maps/Geospatial (see also Place Page)
Center for Biological Diversity map of endangered species in US.
The Atlas of Global Conservation is being published by UC Press and The Nature Conservancy on this day. Presented here at Google by The Nature Conservancy's Lead Scientist, Dr. M. Sanjayan (a Slug!).
Google Earth by Edge of Existence
New Map of Life, interactive of 25K species. See also.
Plants
Six Ways Mushrooms can save the world (TEDtalk video).
Redwoods and climate change is a UC project. 6/11 (video)
See also Forests page.
== Animals == See also Wildlife and New Species
A Gap in Nature Author Tim Flannery on extinction (see link to audio interview)
Diane Ackerman The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds
Bats are in trouble in North America. UCSC's Winifred F. Frick, in a study published in the August 6 issue of Science, writes that a disease is spreading quickly across the northeastern U.S. and Canada and now affects seven bat species. NPR.org interviewaction link. White-nose syndrome has devastated bat populations on the East Coast, and the disease is steadily making its way west. Researchers here are keeping close tabs on the Bay Area's 16 bat species, including one thriving colony south of Sacramento. 4/11 audio, text, images. Bats in the Bay Area (video) 5/11.
Wolves
Never Cry Wolf : Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves Farley Mowat
Cowboys vs. Gray Wolves: Predator Once Again Prey. PBS NewsHour video 9/11 Includes unprecedented de-listing of an endangered species by Congress, not scientists.
The Wolf That Changed America PBS Nature (video)
Amphibians
overview another brief. Climate change, habitat loss and a pathogen combine to make this the most endangered branch of tree of life.
Can regenerate body parts, could help us. 5/12.
Atrazine affects hormones in frogs, what about us? 2/12.
At the University of California, Berkeley, and in ponds around the world, professor Tyrone Hayes studies frogs and other amphibians. He's become an active critic of the farm chemical atrazine, which he's found to interfere with the development of amphibians' endocrine systems. TEDtalk video.
Amphibian Specialist Group is doing a worldwide survey, hoping to find some species thought extinct. npr interview 8/10 Facebook
Pesticide Threatens Frogs. The common pesticide Atrazine is disrupting the sexual development of male frogs, turning one in 10 of them into females, according to a UC Berkeley study released this week. Audio interview w/ integrative biology professor Tyrone Hayes, one of the researchers. KQED Quest.
The Thin Green Line, PBS Nature documentary about frogs
Save the Frogs moves to Santa Cruz.
Disappearing frogs (2008 video report).
Crocodile incubator saves species from extinction 3/12
Insects
E.O Wilson an amazing mind, has spent his life studying insects, especially ants. TEDtalk video is working on an Encyclopedia of Life. 2010 interview about his novel Anthill.
Entomologist Brian Fisher braves raging rivers, and dense tropical forests as he travels the world searching for new species of ants before they are lost to habitat destruction in Madagascar. (Video). TEDxSF talk. The Secret Life of Ants. Helped create Antweb.org, and you can collect ants for research.
Insectopedia (Orion Award winner) combines the close observation of natural science with an unapologetic search for meaning and an untamed sense of wonder. Hugh Raffles travels the world seeking insects and the variety of ways humans relate to them.(audio interview).
Amy Stewart is the author of Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects [author interview audio] 5 min 5/11. Followup to Wicked Plants.
Adventures Among Ants By Mark Moffett University of California Press audio interview 6/10 Includes Argentine ants (audio), which live in enormous "supercolonies" and are considered an invasive species. (One colony stretched 560 miles down the coast of California.)
Darwin's Moth PBS Nature.
Wasp deals with annoying ant (video).
Marlene Zuk, the author of Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World and many other books writes beautifully in the LA Times of the alates, winged ants that fly from their colonies in groups so large they interrupt big human human sporting events to find the torrid romance that will perpetuate their genes, but which ultimately ends in doom for many. The fate of romantic failure and even doom, Zuk says, is something non-humans face all the time, the “millions of ants, millions of robin’s eggs, millions of flower seeds,” that never reach their goal is something we seldom even consider. Personally it reminds us a bit of Daytona Beach at Spring Break: torrents of hopeful youth migrating to meet and mate, not all of whom can possibly be successful. 5/12
Bees [thanks Sabra]
CCD Update 4/12.
Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley, which "carefully narrates his many seasons of experiments using plywood next boxes ...how the swarm 'votes' to decide which nest to occupy. . . . Honeybee Democracy is a brilliant display of science at work, with each experiment explained and illustrated. -- New Scientist"
Colony -- No Bees. No Honey. No Work. No Money investigates colony collapse.
Silence of the Bees PBS documentary on colony collapse syndrome. Colony -- No Bees. No Honey. No Work. No Money investigates colony collapse effect on beekeepers.
Bee update, a potentially game-changing research for understanding Colony Collapse Disorder. 1/11
Man nurses sick bee (Video)
Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg shows us the intricate world of pollen and pollinators with gorgeous high-speed images from his film "Wings of Life" (TEDtalk video).
The Beekeeper's Lament Hannah Nordhaus' lyrical, haunting book about the complicated lives and deaths of America's honeybees review.
Nordhaus is interviewed in this audio documentary which provides a good overview and current status of CCD. Also Gretchen Lebuhn, San Francisco State University professor & founder of The Great Sunflower Project, a citizen science project you can join. 3/12.
More Than Honey offers an extreme close-up of the life of bees. He films bees at a stunning micro level as they mate mid-air, emerge from cocoons and inject honey into honeycomb cells. He also visits beekeepers around the world and dispenses poetic perspectives on the nature of bees.
Reptiles/Turtles
Meet Brookesia micra, one of four newly identified species of ultra-small chameleons that live in Madagascar.
New lizard found in cold Andes.
There Goes Lonesome George, Last Tortoise of His Kind
Invasive Species
"What Invasive Species Are Trying to Tell Us" by Julia Whitty.
Invasive starfish ravages Great Barrier Reef PBS video *** 10/12
Invasive species could be responsible for Devonian extinction.
Toxic Bufo Toad Poses Danger To Other Animals (VIDEO) 10/12. (See Cane Toads)
Invasive Species In Europe Account For 22 Percent Of Mammals, Study Finds 9/12.
Strange Days on Planet Earth episode, narrated by Edward Norton.
Guam spider outbreak because of invasive snakes 9/12.
PBS Nature Doc Invasion of the Giant Pythons in Florida.
Asian Carp in Great Lakes goes to the Supreme Court. One solution, eat them (audio) 4/10.
Nature Out of Place book by Jason Van Driesche on invasive species.
Biological control of invasive weeds by bugs. 3/11
Midwest lakes and rivers, including Great Lakes Mississippi. 2/12 Asian Carp update 2/12.
History
Nikolay Vavilov, the Indiana Jones of Botany: Update: his repository is in trouble. See here 8/10
The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by Peter Pringle audio interview
Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine reflects on What is the Relevance of Vavilov in the Year 2010?:Link
UCSC People
Alumni
Lisa Belenky, Senior Attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, works on protecting rare and endangered species and their habitats under state and federal law. Lisa holds a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law and a bachelor’s in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
John Francis, vice president of research, conservation, and exploration for the National Geographic Society works with Crittercam.
Bruce Lyon uncovers "Soap opera in the marsh": Coots foil nest invaders, reject impostors.
Bruce Stein maps biodiversity.
Shaye Wolf, Staff Biologist, at the Center for Biological Diversity, works with the Center’s Climate Law Institute. She graduated with a bachelor’s in biology from Yale University and received a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology and a master’s in ocean sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she examined the effects of ocean climate change on seabird populations. During her graduate studies, Shaye worked with the biodiversity protection groups in México and California; before that she was a wildlife biologist on projects with seabirds, songbirds, raptors, and spiders.
Chris Darimont, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental studies, and his co-authors found a dramatic acceleration in trait changes among species heavily hunted or fished by humans, which could inform hunting policy.
UCSC Fullbright scholars study global warming, agroecology, and biodiversity.
Chris Darimont does research on human super-predatory activities on fisheries.
Myra Finkelstein studies marine bycatch.
Hoyt Peckham studies endangered turtles
Allison Luengenstudies toxins in the ocean.
Sara Maxwell studies the relationship between seamounts and other large bathymetric features and the migratory and foraging patterns of large pelagic animals, such as seals, seabirds and whales. She am working with the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (www.toppcensus.org) program, and won the 2010 Graduate Research Prize as did Valerie Brown for statistical study of fish populations.
Faculty
Rachel Barnett-Johnson, a fisheries biologist, investigates salmon population.
Dan Costa and his students are tagging marine life to send back realtime information never before available. You can follow activities at TOPP and see Video from KQED's Quest as well as PBS's Ocean Animal Emergency.
James Estes and John Terborgh in a new book explore the importance of predators in Trophic Cascades: Predators, Prey, and the Changing Dynamics of Nature. They explain how top predators play an essential role in maintaining ecosystem well-being, and how this natural regulatory system is often drastically disrupted by human interventions-when wolves and cougars are removed, for example, populations of deer and beaver become destructive.
R. Edward Grumbine is the author of Ghost Bears (Island Press, 1992). He teaches environmental studies at Prescott College and directed the Sierra Institute, University of California Extension, Santa Cruz, for more than a decade. He has written a new book on China, Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River.
Bill Henry and Myra Finkelstein are researching plastic in the oceans.
Paul Koch has done some great research on pre-history which may have implications for our time, such as helping condors survive in the wild.
John Mock works to remove landmines and preserve wildlife in Afghanistan.
Ingrid Parker studies invasive plant species.
Colleen Reichmuth has worked with marine mammals since 1990, conducting research in the areas of comparative cognition, bioacoustics, and behavioral ecology.
Joe Sapp's research is on the socially parasitic "slave-making" or "amazon" ant's fascinating and bizarre system: workers conduct raids on nearby Formica nests. Because of chemical signals, stolen brood work in the parasitic slave-maker nest as if it was their own.
Barry Sinervo and students are creating games to teach about lizard behavior. Recent research shows early effects of global warming 5/10. More links(audio) on Sinervo's work. He also co-wrote a paper showing how rock-scissors-paper dynamic works in biology.
Don Smith and graduate student, Molly Church, who is now at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine have established lead poisoning in condors from ammunition.
Erin Vogel studies primate population.
Chris Wilmers and Terrie Williams, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC, will team up to explore questions of puma behavior, physiology, and ecology using radio collars. Cougar GPS story.
See also Wildlife
Articles in category "Bio-diversity"
The following 4 pages are in this category, out of 4 total.
