Blogs

Opinion piece in the NY Times on the historical naming of species in China by European scientists.

The UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has just published the latest assessment of the 26 national biodiversity indicators for England on their website.  Not good news for farmland birds, some butterflies, grassland plants and invasive species impacts. /...more

.../Worth looking at this in some detail.  On the natural history side, there is reasonable news for some groups of organisms with either improvements or stability since 2000 and often back to the 1980s.  Gradual and sustained improvements in areas where there has been concerted regulatory effort since the 1970s - so freshwater quality, marine pollution and some fisheries.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity are looked at through the spring responses of certain sensitive species - lot of noise in the data, as you might expect, but a conclusion of temperature-sensitive events becoming gradually earlier in the year - since 1999 around 9 days earlier than the mean for the 20th Century.

Public attitudes are interesting - not a lot of development in awareness of the relatively technical term "biodiversity" but a sustained increase in visiting nature reserves over the years.

Biodiversity action plans show a slight decrease in the number of species and habitats where things are getting worse, and an increase in stability.

Comment piece in Nature on sharing data, access and academic credit  in the Earth Sciences in the context of the International Polar Year.  Assesssment of technical and cultural barriers to access.  Carlson, D (2011) A lesson in sharing. Nature 469 293 (20 January 2011) doi:10.1038/469293a

Interesting paper in Science in December comparing a range of models and scenarios for biodiversity in the 21st Century.  General conclusion is of continuing loss, but the degree of potential loss is uncertain, with very different projections from different models.  Pereira et al. 2010 Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century. Science 330 1496-1501. doi: 10.1126/science.1196624

BBSRC and NERC have provided £250k for a new round of SynTAx grants for research in systematics and taxonomy - administered by the Linnean Society and the Systematics Association.  Deadline 31 January 2010.