Hannah Hoag

Tag: biodiversity

  • Taxonomy in Trouble in Canada

    Taxonomy in Trouble in Canada

    Canada is at risk of losing its taxonomic expertise, according to a report released today.

    The report details stagnant research funding, greying experts, a lag in digitization and a lack of support for national collections. This is threatening Canada’s understanding of its biodiversity, and the ecosystem services it provides, the report concludes.

    “Canadian contributions to describing new species has dropped from being 6th in the world to 14th in the last decade,” says Thomas Lovejoy, Biodiversity Chair at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, who chaired the panel of 14 Canadian and international experts who authored the report. “The taxonomic expertise in Canada is slipping at the moment when it needs to surge forward.”

    The effects are already being felt. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada recently filled positions on its subcommittees with outside experts because not enough Canadians had expertise in several taxonomic groups, including terrestrial and freshwater molluscs, lichens and mosses, the report says.

    Canada has more than 50 million wildlife specimens in collections worth over CDN$250 million, but there is no strategy for their maintenance, says David Green, director of the Redpath Museum at McGill University in Montreal. There are few storage facilities with advanced climate and pest control systems, and many are bulging beyond capacity.

    The story continues on Nature’s blog The Great Beyond.

  • Cold cash for cold science

    Cold cash for cold science

    The recent funding wrap-up from the international polar year (IPY) has left many Canadian researchers scratching their heads, trying to find a way to continue their arctic science projects. A new grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada may help close that research-funding gap.

    In its announcement yesterday, NSERC opened a competition to fund large-scale research with a focus—for this round of funding—on northern earth systems. The Discovery Frontiers initiative will heft Can$4 million over five years on the successful research team to study the physical, chemical, biological and social factors that affect the North and its inhabitants—and to come up with solutions. Fresh water, sea level, permafrost, weather patterns, biodiversity or climate change adaptation could be part of the successful pitch. The northern community will help define the projects and their goals.

    The story continues at Nature’s blog The Great Beyond.

  • Confronting the biodiversity crisis

    Confronting the biodiversity crisis

    In 2002, the world’s governments agreed to significantly slow the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Time is almost up, and by most accounts they’ve failed. Now that climate change is emerging as one of biodiversity’s greatest threats, scientists are proposing new ways to tackle the crisis. Hannah Hoag reports.

    Barcoding life

    In July 2009, for the fourth year in a row, a swarm of biologists fanned out across the tundra near Churchill, Manitoba, in northern Canada. They plucked fragments of plants and animals — feathers and fur, mayflies and moths — from land, lakes, rivers and ocean. At the lab, the specimens were ground up and identified using short stretches of DNA — a unique barcode for every species. So far, the team — led by Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who invented DNA barcoding (Proc. R. Soc. B 270, 313–321; 2003) to speed up the process of taxonomy — has identified more than 4,000 species from its northern expeditions, including parasitic wasps that have been observed across North America but were previously overlooked in the Canadian Arctic.

    “The first business of conservation is telling species apart,” says Hebert. Before barcoding, biological specimens were identified on the basis of morphology, behaviour and genetics. The technique will offer a “quantum jump” in the rate that species are registered, says Hebert. What once took months can now take a few hours. It also gives biodiversity a boost: barcoding has repeatedly shown that one species is, in fact, three, or ten (Evol. Biol. 7, 121; 2007).

     

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  • Warmer caves may save bats from deadly fungus

    Warmer caves may save bats from deadly fungus

    Nancy Heaslip, New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation
    Nancy Heaslip, New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation

    Shivering bats need help to fight off white-nose syndrome

    Researchers are hoping that heated bat boxes can curtail the number of bats dying from white-nose syndrome — a condition that has decimated hibernating bats across the northeastern United States.

    As many as half a million bats have died from the poorly understood ailment since it was discovered in New York state in 2006. Because the bodies of emaciated bats are often found strewn around the entrances of affected caves, scientists have hypothesized that the bats are starving to death during hibernation. Now, a pair of ecologists has created a mathematical model that suggests the bats’ hibernation patterns are being altered, forcing them to burn through their fat reserves to warm up. Furthermore, they propose placing heated huts within affected caves for the bats to move into, allowing them to conserve energy — and survive.

    :: continue reading in Nature ::