Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Instead of worrying about individual species, environmentalists should worry primarily about entire ecosystems. The pig-tailed bandicoot had no mourners. But the ecosystem in the entire Australian outback is the concern of millions of people. It is in our best interest to preserve large swaths of wilderness and thereby save as many species as possible. It plays to human self-interest because a diversity of species makes land and sea more productive in the long-term. Many conservation groups have been involved in drives to buy up tracts of wilderness to preserve them from rapacious corporations. Such efforts (which Wilson...
...report “identified significant gaps in our ability to describe our ecosystem,” said Robin O’Malley, the project director. “If the American people want to have a complete and rich picture of the state of our ecosystem, we need to address these gaps...
...damage being done is more than aesthetic. Many vanishing species provide humans with both food and medicine. What's more, once you start tearing out swaths of ecosystem, you upset the existing balance in ways that harm even areas you didn't intend to touch. Environmentalists have said this for decades, and now that many of them have tempered ecological absolutism with developmental realism, more people are listening...
...pests. "Introduced species are one of the principal causes of endangerment for half of endangered species," says Daniel Simberloff, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee. Cracking down on at least one invader that has yet to get a real finhold in the ecosystem may not be much, but it's better than letting it through...
...long) were retrieved from samples of leaf litter as part of a biological dragnet conducted in 1998 for the Central Park Conservancy by researchers Liz Johnson and Kefyn Catley of the American Museum of Natural History. Their mission: to assess the health of the park's somewhat trampled woodland ecosystem in order to better preserve it. The creatures they collected were sorted and sent to various taxonomists for positive ID, which is how this one ended up in the hands of Richard Hoffman, curator of invertebrates at the Virginia Museum of Natural History...