Lovejoy Thomas E.

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Lovejoy
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Thomas E.
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  • Article
    Mapping the biosphere : exploring species to understand the origin, organization and sustainability of biodiversity
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012-03-27) Wheeler, Q. D. ; Knapp, Sandra ; Stevenson, D. W. ; Stevenson, J. ; Blum, Stan D. ; Boom, B.. M. ; Borisy, Gary G. ; Buizer, James L. ; De Carvalho, M. R. ; Cibrian, A. ; Donoghue, M. J. ; Doyle, V. ; Gerson, E. M. ; Graham, C. H. ; Graves, P. ; Graves, Sara J. ; Guralnick, Robert P. ; Hamilton, A. L. ; Hanken, J. ; Law, W. ; Lipscomb, D. L. ; Lovejoy, Thomas E. ; Miller, Holly ; Miller, J. S. ; Naeem, Shahid ; Novacek, M. J. ; Page, L. M. ; Platnick, N. I. ; Porter-Morgan, H. ; Raven, Peter H. ; Solis, M. A. ; Valdecasas, A. G. ; Van Der Leeuw, S. ; Vasco, A. ; Vermeulen, N. ; Vogel, J. ; Walls, R. L. ; Wilson, E. O. ; Woolley, J. B.
    The time is ripe for a comprehensive mission to explore and document Earth's species. This calls for a campaign to educate and inspire the next generation of professional and citizen species explorers, investments in cyber-infrastructure and collections to meet the unique needs of the producers and consumers of taxonomic information, and the formation and coordination of a multi-institutional, international, transdisciplinary community of researchers, scholars and engineers with the shared objective of creating a comprehensive inventory of species and detailed map of the biosphere. We conclude that an ambitious goal to describe 10 million species in less than 50 years is attainable based on the strength of 250 years of progress, worldwide collections, existing experts, technological innovation and collaborative teamwork. Existing digitization projects are overcoming obstacles of the past, facilitating collaboration and mobilizing literature, data, images and specimens through cyber technologies. Charting the biosphere is enormously complex, yet necessary expertise can be found through partnerships with engineers, information scientists, sociologists, ecologists, climate scientists, conservation biologists, industrial project managers and taxon specialists, from agrostologists to zoophytologists. Benefits to society of the proposed mission would be profound, immediate and enduring, from detection of early responses of flora and fauna to climate change to opening access to evolutionary designs for solutions to countless practical problems. The impacts on the biodiversity, environmental and evolutionary sciences would be transformative, from ecosystem models calibrated in detail to comprehensive understanding of the origin and evolution of life over its 3.8 billion year history. The resultant cyber-enabled taxonomy, or cybertaxonomy, would open access to biodiversity data to developing nations, assure access to reliable data about species, and change how scientists and citizens alike access, use and think about biological diversity information.
  • Article
    Land and deep-sea mining: the challenges of comparing biodiversity impacts
    (Springer, 2023-03-18) Katona, Steven ; Paulikas, Daina ; Ali, Saleem ; Clarke, Michael ; Ilves, Erika ; Lovejoy, Thomas E. ; Madin, Laurence P. ; Stone, Gregory S.
    The term ‘biodiversity,’ while casually used in practice, is a complicated subject to measure, interpret, contextualize, and compare. Yet the possible advent of deep-sea mining in the mid-2020’s compels us to compare potential impacts of biodiversity loss across ecologically distant realms, a formidable task. Supplying the world’s green infrastructure is expected to lead to shortages of nickel, cobalt and other metals; meanwhile polymetallic nodules sitting atop the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean contain billions of tons of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, enough to solve the supply issues. Implicit in society’s decision of whether to exploit this resource is a tradeoff of harm to biodiversity in the CCZ’s abyssal seafloor and its overlying water column, versus intensification of harm to rainforests and other terrestrial mining habitats. Here we frame the challenges of comparing biodiversity impacts across such different realms, spanning the gamut from normative to fundamental: ambiguities in definitions, lack of protocol standardization, physical challenges in measurement, difficulties to integrate measures among different taxonomic groups, profound differences between ecologically distant realms, contextual necessity to attribute value to mathematical index results, and constraints of current knowledge about species, ecosystems and system level impacts of biodiversity change. Quantitative biodiversity measures alone cannot rank one system above the other; measures must be supplemented with qualitative judgements of the tangible and intangible values of species and habitats to natural systems and to humans, along with consideration of other threats that they and we face.