It’s been said, repeatedly, that the single most important advance in environmental science was the development of a global observation system. Through the combination of satellites and regional and locally-scaled observations, environmental scientists are now able to study the earth as a whole, in real time. Any number of metaphors are available, but the power of having that kind of technology should be obvious. At any given time, we can know how much the ice caps have melted this summer; what the air quality is like in Beijing; how big the next hurricane will be. The Global Earth Observatory System of Systems is, quite simply, awesome.

But with the biodiversity crisis, there is no concomitant global observation system. We can’t say, on any given day, how much habitat has been lost; how many insects have gone extinct; where people are hunting. There’s plenty of data available in individual pieces, at different scales, covering different time periods, but it isn’t collected together in one place in a meaningful way. People are trying to change that, however. This piece in the Policy Forum of Science gives a nice introduction at efforts underway to create the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network  (GEO BON) (no doubt located in the Department of Redundancy Department, yuk yuk.) Bad jokes aside, the GEO BON is “a new global partnership to help collect, manage, analyze, and report data relating to the status of the world’s biodiversity.”

Meanwhile, here’s a more nitty-gritty paper in Conservation Letters that details development of the new IUCN Red List Index measuring extinction risk for taxa through time. The authors address

selecting the taxonomic groups to be included in the index, determining the minimum sample size (number of species) necessary to provide robust trends, determing a sampling strategy to ensure sufficient geographic and taxonomic representation, establishing methods for aggregating data and weighting the index, and estimating confidence intervals.

Such an effort is good and necessary. If what I’ve heard about some IUCN Red List groups is true, developing a robust and transparent strategy for determining extinction risk can only improve current efforts. However, one of the things that really stood out to me from the recent SCB conference is that people’s efforts to identify key indicator taxa has sort of stalled. All the talks I attended that addressed this issue concluded that it wasn’t working. I suspect that results from a simple evolutionary / ecological fact: diversity exists because of empty niches. The hope in identifying an indicator group is that there’s some correlation between that particular taxon, but biodiversity is on a very basic level inherently un-correlated. Now, that’s not to say I think developing these methods is a waste of time, merely that as we move forward we must always be cognizant of the fact that focusing on one area of biodiversity, whether it’s at the genetic, species, ecosystem or landscape level, we will necessarily ignore other parts of the whole. I’d like to refer to this as the Whack-a-Mole dilemma.

Scholes, R. et al. Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System. Science, 321: 1044-1045. (doi 10.1126/science.1162055)

Baillie, J. et al. Toward monitoring global biodiversity. Conservation Letters, 1:1, 18-26. (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2008.00009.x)