Protecting biodiversity is essential to our health and longevity on this planet. But can we quantify that value? Especially the economic value?

Late last year, researchers from the US and France attempted to put dollar amounts on the importance of biodiversity by correlating it to the prevalence of tropical disease in developing countries. According to their introduction in PLoS Biology:

Along with 93% of the global burden of vector-borne and parasitic diseases (VBPDs), the tropics host 41 of the 48 “least developed countries” and only two of 34 “advanced economies.”

They contend that economic growth falters when people get sick. (Seems reasonable.) And the spread of disease among humans, many scientists argue, can increase or decrease depending on factors in the natural environment, including biodiversity.

The more diverse an ecosystem, the greater the chance that a pathogen is diluted among numerous and potentially less-than-ideal host species and, therefore, the less abundant the disease. In 2002, researchers found this to be true with Lyme disease. NPR sums it up well:

If you have a rich community of tick hosts, like squirrels, mice and other small mammals, the disease is diluted among them. But if the habitat is degraded, and ticks carrying Lyme have only white-footed mice as hosts, the disease risk to humans can rise dramatically.

The Academy’s microbiologist, Shannon Bennett, weighed in on biodiversity’s impact on human diseases. In a recent email, she wrote:

I am sure biodiversity influences the transmission of infectious diseases one way or another.  Over 75% of new, emerging or re-emerging human diseases are caused by pathogens from animals, according to the World Health Organization. That means that the ecological communities we live in, and how pathogens cycle through the different players, are key to human health. Biodiversity is one way that we measure the complexity of these communities. In what way biodiversity is important, or how these communities specifically affect infectious diseases and risk, depends on the pathogen ecology and life history, and host species relationships.

Stanford researchers brought up this same point last month—“depends on the particulars,” as Bennett put it—in a study in Ecology Letters. A summary from the Stanford Report states:

The researchers found that the links between biodiversity and disease prevalence are variable and dependent on the disease system, local ecology and probably human social context.

The role of individual host species and their interactions with other hosts, vectors and pathogens are more influential in determining local disease risk, the analysis found.

That dovetails exactly with the research Bennett and Academy entomologist Durrell Kapan are conducting. They’re currently studying mosquito vector communities and the relationships between their biodiversity, the diversity of their microbes, and the presence of pathogens.

As for putting a price tag on biodiversity, Bennett encourages the PLoS study’s authors:

I find the authors’ argument intriguing and certainly a significant angle to consider in support of the health value of biodiversity, and one that is unique—no one has teased out the financial correlations between biodiversity and human societies. That it includes human health and infectious diseases is the angle I find particularly intriguing and worth following up on with empirical studies.

And on these studies of human disease and biodiversity in general? Bennett is excited about the possibilities of further research, including her own:

Increasingly we are recognizing and appreciating that humans are members of complex communities of other species, and that the make-up of these communities, whether they live inside of us or outside, can be very important to human health, as well as the health of all life. Human health and the health of life on this planet are coupled. We need to understand those coupling mechanisms better to ensure sustainability of that life, and the best way to understand those coupling mechanisms is with a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together human health researchers with ecologists and evolutionary biologists, to name a few!

Some organizations have sprung up to do just that. Bennett points to two examples: the One Health Initiative and the EcoHealth Association. Whatever dollar value we assign to biodiversity and other ecosystem services, let’s wish these organizations luck in improving human health and well-being.

Image: CDC

Here’s one: Dimensions of Biodiversity, a program for graduate students funded by the National Science Foundation. It currently boasts 112 grad students from 14 institutions in five countries, with 23 faculty members advising these students.

Their mission? According to their website, “To prepare the next generation of biodiversity researchers for higher levels of academic and scientific interaction, while simultaneously advancing, synthesizing, and baselining knowledge of biodiversity science on a global scale.”

At the AAAS meeting last month, three members of the program talked about a few of the various projects of Dimensions of Biodiversity.

Selina Heppell, a professor at Oregon State University, discussed a project to measure biodiversity in the oceans utilizing commercial fishing data. Samantha Davis, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, described three separate projects looking at the variability in biodiversity in tropical forests. And Ailene Ettinger, a student at the University of Washington, looked at data about the efficacy of citizen science and the data collected by non-scientists. (Her PowerPoint opened with a picture of citizen scientists on the Academy’s roof!)

The young researchers are using existing data in each study, looking at old observations in entirely new ways. All of the projects span many institutions and approach biodiversity beyond species numbers. They look at the diversity of individual species, of course, but they also look at the diversity of groups of species and functions of each species. For example, you can look at functional biodiversity as how many herbivores, carnivores, top predators, and bottom dwellers exist within an ecosystem. Their diagram, above right, demonstrates this and the effects and influences to an ecosystem.

Students drive each endeavor, but they don’t need to select something within their particular program of study. And like the iGem teams, each project includes a diverse group of students—biologists, statisticians, writers, you name it.

And the results? A recent paper about remote sensing in rainforests and two more publications forthcoming (see here and here). Also an online blog that was introduced earlier this year at the popular Science Online conference.

The Academy supports a similar NSF-funded program, this one for undergraduates. The Summer Systematics Institute has been running for an astounding 17 years and “addresses critical issues such as, world-wide threats to biodiversity, the origins and diversification of life, phylogenetic systematics and evolutionary biology, which have become critical components of undergraduate education.” Stay tuned for a video about the SSI program, available on Science Today later this year.

Diagram courtesy of biodiverseperspectives.com

10 years

102 researchers from 21 countries

129,000 specimens

25,000 species in a 6,000-hectare forest

…yielding an estimate of 6 million arthropod species on our planet.

Ready for the details behind the numbers?

In 2003 and 2004, a large team of scientists (see numbers above) led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on an endeavor called Project IBISCA-Panama, scoured Panama’s San Lorenzo rainforest for arthropods (which includes insects, spiders, and millipedes).

They sampled the forest from top to bottom from a construction crane, inflatable platforms, and balloons, climbing ropes through forest layers as well as crawling along the forest floor to sift soil and trap arthropods.

They then spent the next eight years identifying the 129,000 specimens collected within twelve 20-by-20 meter squares. They determined that within those specimens, there were over 6,000 species of arthropods. Using various models the team extrapolated the total number of arthropod species to 25,000 residing in the 6,000-hectare forest.

The research is published in the current edition of Science.

According to Science Now,

The study is the most extensive survey of insects, spiders, and their relatives ever undertaken and should help researchers get a better understanding of what factors influence biodiversity.

“This is a high number as it implies that for every species of vascular plant, bird or mammal in this forest, you will find 20, 83, and 312 species of arthropods, respectively,” explains lead author Yves Basset.

“If we are interested in conserving the diversity of life on Earth, we should start thinking about how best to conserve arthropods,” adds Tomas Roslin, one of 35 co-authors.

“Another exciting finding was that the diversity of both herbivorous and non-herbivorous arthropods could be accurately predicted from the diversity of plants,” says Basset.

“By focusing conservation efforts on floristically diverse sites, we may save a large fraction of arthropods under the same umbrella. Further, this strengthens past ideas that we should really be basing estimates of global species richness on the number of plant species,” stresses Roslin.

For some amazing images of these arthropods and the collection process, please visit National Geographic.

Image: Thomas Martin, Jean-Philippe Sobczak, and Hendrik Dietz, T.U. Munich

Biodiversity informatics is a way to catalog life—its diversity and distribution, its past, its present—and potentially, its future. With the world changing so quickly, biodiversity informatics can be the key to protecting all of life on Earth.

The Academy’s Stan Blum leads our biodiversity informatics effort and his bio page describes his work well:

Academy scientists generate enormous amounts of information as they collect, describe, document, and compare organisms. That information comes in a variety of forms, including text, photographs, DNA sequences, taxonomic names, classifications, distributions maps, and ultimately publications.  Our goals in biodiversity informatics are to ensure that information is captured effectively when it is created, and flows efficiently through analysis, into appropriate outputs.

Capture Effectively

While biodiversity informatics would not exist without 21st-century technology, it’s actually been around since the mid-80s, undertaken by a group called the Biodiversity Information Standards or TDWG, from their original name—the Taxonomic Databases Working Group. As their name implies, the importance is on creating an industry standard to share the information on life stored in the collections of institutions like ours. Stan attended their conference last month in New Orleans. Through conferences such as these, 250 or so biodiversity informatics scientists from all over the world develop new technologies and share best practices to catalog life—its evolution, ecology, biogeography and more.

Appropriate Outputs

Cataloging allows scientists throughout the world to use the data for different research projects. From building the Encyclopedia of Life to challenging old models of plant distributions on islands to understanding threatening invasive species—the primary data supporting these studies are assembled and shared through another organization called the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

And this is just the birth of this notion. As more collections—in addition to the Academy’s—become part of these catalogs, they will become more vital in protecting all life on our wonderful planet. “Conservation depends on this information,” Stan urges.

21st-century science to address 21st-century concerns…

Image: Tom Harpel/Wikipedia

It is known that biologically diverse streams are better at cleaning up pollutants than less rich waterways, so Bradley Cardinale of the University of Michigan created 150 miniature model streams to find out why this is.

The model streams use recirculating water in flumes to mimic the variety of flow conditions found in natural streams. Cardinale grew between one and eight species of algae in each of the mini-streams, then measured each algae community’s ability to soak up nitrate, a nitrogen compound that is a nutrient pollutant of global concern. He found that nitrate uptake increased linearly with species richness. On average, the eight-species mix removed nitrate 4.5 times faster than a single species of algae grown alone.

The reason? Niche partitioning, Cardinale said.

In the stream experiments, each algae species was best adapted to a particular habitat in the stream and gravitated to that location—its unique ecological niche. As more algae species were added, more of the available habitats were used, and the stream became a bigger, more absorbent sponge for nitrate uptake and storage.

Sound familiar? Think Charles Darwin. “People as far back as Darwin have argued that species should have unique niches and, as a result, we should see a division of labor in the environment,” Cardinale said.

This is exciting news because nitrate is an ingredient in many fertilizers and is found in surface runoff from agricultural land that makes its way into streams, lakes and coastal zones. It is a leading cause of degraded water quality worldwide.

“The primary implication of this paper is that naturally diverse habitats are pretty good at cleaning up the pollutants we dump into the environment, and loss of biodiversity through species extinctions could be compromising the ability of the planet to clean up after us,” according to Cardinale.

Image credit: Danuta Bennett

Villy Christensen of the University of British Columbia (UBC) said, “Yes, there will be fish left, but it will be a very different ocean from the ones your parents and grandparents knew and even different from now.”

The biggest difference? Large, predatory fish will be gone.

In fact, over the last one hundred years, the population of these large, top-of-the-food-web fish has declined by two-thirds, half of that decline occurring only in the last 40 years. And that population continues to decline.

There will be many small fish left, but not necessarily the ones we eat.

He and his colleague, Reg Watson, also from UBC, are working with scientists, governments and NGOs to build a global database of fishing efforts to truly understand what’s going on in the world’s oceans.

Seventy-six million tons of fish are consumed each year, and Watson found that we are fishing harder for the same or less result. It’s possible that we’ve hit “peak fish,” according to Watson. Jacqueline Alder of the UN Environment Program in Kenya is working with the UBC group, looking at their models in terms of marine biodiversity and sustainability. She urged that we must reduce fishing efforts immediately to allow fish stocks to rebuild.

In addition, there was much discussion around the non-sustainability of using fish for feedstock in aquaculture and agriculture– fish we are not directly eating. The science and technology have to get better to use plant-based feedstock for fish farms.

Christensen stressed this is a large view of what’s going on in the entire ocean ecosystem, not just one area or species.

For more focused, local information, read our recent article on banning shark finning, and the San Francisco Chronicle had a devastating article last week stating that some of the fish in the Delta may be too far gone to save from extinction.

Image: Mila Zinkova/Wikimedia

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

A group of scientists who study biodiversity and infectious diseases, reviewed several dozen research papers published in the last five years and found a link between biodiversity loss and an increase in transmittable disease.  Specifically, they discovered that species losses in ecosystems from forests to fields results in increased pathogens in the system.

The pattern holds true for various types of pathogens—viruses, bacteria, fungi—and for many types of hosts, whether humans, other animals, or plants. The researchers found two familiar human diseases that fit this pattern—West Nile virus and Lyme disease.

Sadly, the animals, plants, and microbes most likely to disappear as biodiversity is lost are often those that buffer infectious disease transmission. Those that remain tend to be species that magnify the transmission of infectious diseases.

In one example, three different studies found strong links between low bird diversity and increased occurrence of West Nile encephalitis in the United States. Ecosystems with low bird diversity contained bird species more susceptible to the virus; thus increasing infection rates in mosquitoes and people. In comparison, ecosystems that contained a higher diversity of birds had many species that were unfit as hosts for the virus.

The authors are hoping these results will spur action. For humans and other species to remain healthy, it will take more than a village—we need an entire planet, the scientists say, one with its diversity thriving.

Global biodiversity has declined at an unprecedented pace since the 1950s. Current extinction rates are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than in past epochs, and are projected to increase at least a thousand times more in the next 50 years.

“When a clinical trial of a drug shows that it works,” says lead author Felicia Keesing of Bard College, “the trial is halted so the drug can be made available. In a similar way, the protective effect of biodiversity is clear enough that we need to implement policies to preserve it now.”

Image of West Nile virus by PhD Dre/Wikipedia

About a year ago, I heard Academy researchers talk about the same goal, identifying all life as quickly (and thoroughly) as possible, starting in pockets around the world where our research is and has been strong—Madagascar, the Coral Triangle, Gaoligongshan, and of course, California.

Why the need? Why the desire to accomplish this? I emailed Quentin Wheeler, the meeting organizer, who told me “With the biodiversity crisis, the need to advance taxonomy and species discovery has never been more urgent.” The Academy’s Stan Blum, who was part of the meeting, told me:

Human actions are profoundly changing our planet.  Knowing what exists and where will help us understand the resources we have at our disposal, and what we are at risk of losing. Right now we are like rich kids that haven’t learned to manage the family fortune. From medicine, to agriculture, to renewable energy, our reliance on the living portion of our natural heritage—biodiversity— is profound.

This project will include scientists from institutions around the world. Working together, in an open research format, is essential, says Blum:

This science is a global enterprise.  Every country has an interest in knowing how its own ecosystems work, and collectively we all have an interest in knowing life on Earth.

According to Wheeler, it won’t just be scientists. We can all get involved:

We spent a fair amount of time talking about citizen science and there are lots of exciting ideas for expanding involvement.  What I find especially exciting about cyber-enabled taxonomy or cybertaxonomy—the fusion of traditional taxonomic goals with cyber tools—is the coming democratization of taxonomy.  While only a privileged few in the past could access the rare literature and type- and rare-specimens in order to conduct taxonomy at high levels of excellence, all those resources are being digitized and soon citizen scientists will be able to take their work as far as their passion and talents permit.

(For more information on cybertaxonomy and to find out about the organization behind this proposal, check out the International Institution for Species Exploration website.)

I asked Blum if the goal was realistic, “to identify and describe all the world’s 10 million species in the next 50 years.”

Yes, with a few caveats.  This initiative doesn’t have a finite goal like landing on the moon; it doesn’t have the simple demonstration of achievement symbolized by planting a flag. Nevertheless, the value in going to the moon was not planting the flag.  The value was in what came out of getting there. We may never know ALL the species there are, but before we lose traction worrying about how we’ll know when we’re done, we really need to understand that we’re at the other end of the process with some very important and large groups of organisms.  Our ignorance is still profound.  It is very possible to achieve the discovery rate we need to meet the 50-year goal.

How much will it cost? How will it get funded? Wheeler told us that there will be a final report in March 2011, but a first report is expected earlier next year. This is a subject our institution is very passionate about. In fact, it’s in our mission statement: to explore, explain and protect the natural world. All of it. So stay tuned.

Creative Commons image by treegrow/flickr