WebSites:
Biogeography & Conservation Lab, The Natural History Museum, London. "Biodiversity: Measuring the Variety of Nature and Selecting Priorities Areas for Conservation."
Presents a world map showing equatorial countries in Central and South America and South East Asia to have the highest biodiversity. Biodiversity is defined as the total (and irreducible) complexity of all life, including not only the great variety of organisms but also their varying behavior and interactions. Because this definition is impractical to define numerically, the authors explain the value-based measurement approaches, including best estimates (genes), practical estimates (species), popular estimates (higher taxa), and techniques to incorporate both rarity and endemism which are used to prepare the map. The web site concludes with 14 key references and a list of biodiversity measurement publications spanning 1991 to 2001.
Tree of Life Web Project
Hoping to learn more about the evolutionary history or biology of your study species? The Tree of Life web site offers one of the most comprehensive phylogenies available. A phylogeny is a family tree of sorts, but at a species (or higher taxa) level. While library searches will lead you to a stack of papers focusing on the phylogeny of a given subset of species, the Tree of Life provides a recent consensus from a global network of experts. More importantly, the tree combines studies on all branches (taxa), allowing a researcher to view not only how his or her study species is related to similar species, but also relationships between higher taxa (at the genus, family, order, kingdom, etc. level). In addition to providing phylogenetic information, the site also offers information on the natural history of each species. In a nutshell, this site provides a good indication of what information is know for each taxa, and is updated by the experts that study them. This is the sort of web site evolutionary biologists and ecologists alike will find exciting.
This web site has an essay written by Insurgent Subcommander Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army which was written in August of 1992. The article, "Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, a Storm and a Prophecy" was not published until 1994. Much of what he discusses is about the bio-devastation, extinct species and exploitation of grazing land, hydro-power and minerals in relation to neo-liberalism and genocide. It's very poetically written and was a revelation at the time, when nobody knew anything about the abuses of Indigenous and land rights in that area. It has been published in several magazines around the world, and this web site has the full text.
This is the web site for the nature conservancy. The main goal, as most of you know, for the organization is to protect biodiversity through the purchase and management of habitat. The site has links to various projects that the nature conservancy does, press releases for their activities, and membership information.
This is a web site for the Centre for Plant Diversity and Systematics. This is essentially a set of labs where they do research having to do with biodiversity informatics, phylogenetics, floristic inventories, and conservation programs. It has its own useful set of links and lists of publications that have been through work at the Centre.
This web page is essentially an essay on THE CURRENT STATE OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY. The first author, E.O. Wilson, is regarded as one of the world's experts on biodiversity. This page includes lists with numbers of described species in each of many different taxa. The page is great for a brief exposition on biodiversity from the perspective of one of the 20th century's great scientists.
This web site is sponsored by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. It offers a thorough overview of the rainforest ecosystem. Its subsections discuss how rainforests work; how the animals adapt; the importance of rainforests in terms of human needs; the harm that is being done to them; and what we can do to save them. This web site is very informative and illustrates the importance of rainforests in terms of biodiversity. There are also some great pictures on this web site!!!!
This web site was created by Biodiversity Challenge, a group of voluntary organizations which come together to influence the implementation of the Biodiversity Action Plan. These organizations are Butterfly Conservation; Friends of the Earth; Plantlife; RSPB; The Wildlife Trusts and WWF-UK. On this web site you will find the 'Biodiversity Counts: Delivering a Better quality of Life' report which identifies the successes and failures of the Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) process, and a further detailed analysis of the report. Links to the web sites of the organizations within the BDC group are provided on the web site.