biodiversity – Quanta Magazine

Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’

Lesley Evans Ogden — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 14:27:09 +0000

Anne Salomon’s first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh Island, which sits just offshore of the northwestern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Among the tide pools of this isolated island, Salomon peered at the web of life on the rocks...

Source

‘Species Repulsion’ Enables High Biodiversity in Tropical Trees

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 14:14:02 +0000

For ecologists, tropical rainforests hold many enigmas. A single hectare can contain hundreds of tree species, far more than in forests closer to the poles. Somehow these species coexist in such dizzying abundance that, as naturalists and ecologists have sometimes noted, tropical forests can feel like botanical gardens, where every plant is something new. For such throngs of species to be packed...

Source

The Key to Species Diversity May Be in Their Similarities

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 14:36:21 +0000

More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of forest on the planet. They began counting every tree with a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the...

Source

How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate

Anna Funk — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:00:58 +0000

In March 2018 at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, surrounded by his devoted keepers, Sudan the northern white rhino breathed his last. He wasn’t the only remaining northern white rhino because three females in protective captivity survived him. But Sudan’s death ended any hope of those females breeding naturally and rendered the northern white rhino effectively extinct.

Source

She Tracks the DNA of Elusive Species That Hide in Harsh Places

Rachel Crowell — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 15:00:27 +0000

Tracie Seimon discovered her passion for the natural world early. As a child growing up in Colorado, she enjoyed “harvesting insects” from her family backyard and keeping a hobby ant farm. When she saw trees being cut down on television, she would get distraught. She and her father used to study the night sky through a telescope until her curiosity prompted her to disassemble the telescope to...

Source