Jeannine Cavender-Bares
Question and problem statement
What are the bioservices of organisms that contribute to human well-being? Where
and when in the history of life did they arise? How valuable are they in economic
terms?
Biological organisms that comprise the diversity of life on Earth provide services
that sustain human life and contribute to our well-being. We are increasingly
recognizing the benefits of biodiversity to humans (Isbell et al. 2011, Cardinale et al.
2012), yet huge gaps remain in identifying the functions of organisms upon which
humans depend. We have an even poorer understanding of how those bioservices
are distributed across the “tree of life” and of their contributions to humans in
economic terms (Kareiva et al 2011)(Petit et al. 2013). In the face of altered climate
and human dominion of Planet Earth, a grand challenge for the 21st century is to
take stock of the function, value and origins of the organisms that are integral to the
sustenance of our life-support systems. Addressing this problem requires
integration across multiple domains of biology and applied economics, developing
process-based models linking organismal functions to bioservices and ultimately to
economic value, and bridging data sources, databases, software tools and
cyberinfrastructure from natural history museums, molecular systematics,
functional ecology, ecosystem ecology, and environmental economics.
How will the answer transform the state of the science?
Biodiversity research has often proceeded by counting the number of species in a
system rather than considering the functions of those organisms or their historical
context. Yet, consistently we find that integrating information about the
phylogenetic history of organisms and their function provides more explanatory
power in ecosystem function and service provision than numbers of species
(Cadotte et al 2008, Cavender-Bares et al 2009). Currently, scientists are limited by
disciplinary boundaries, skill sets and software tools associated with those
boundaries in accessing critical information about the evolutionary context and
timescale in which critical bioservices arose and their economic valuation. Were
existing tools for biodiversity research across disciplines seamlessly integrated,
such barriers would be diminished, allowing a more realistic and truly
transformative picture to emerge of the nature and value of the Earth’s biodiversity.
How will the answer benefit society?
Management of our biodiversity capital is, in part, an accounting problem. How can
we wisely manage biodiversity if we don’t know what we have and how individual
organisms contribute to our life support systems? The tree of life provides a
convenient framework on which to map the bioservices of organisms. More
importantly, it tells the story of the history of life on Earth, provides insight into the
conditions critical to the origins and maintenance of bioservices, and reveals much
about the redundancy and potential substitutability of bioservices. By addressing
this grand challenge problem, we will build the capacity to take stock of the
bioservices of life on Earth, recognize the evolutionary context in which these
services arose and identify “hot spots” of bioservices. In turn, an integrated picture
of these bioservices can emerge, be visualized readily by school children and
Jeannine Cavender-Bares
brought into national and global accounting frameworks to manage for a sustainable
future.
References
Bradley J. Cardinale, J.Emmett Duffy, Andrew Gonzalez, David U. Hooper, Charles
Perrings, Patrick Venail, Anita Narwani, Georgina M. Mace, David Tilman, David
A.Wardle, Ann P. Kinzig, Gretchen C. Daily, Michel Loreau, James B. Grace, Anne
Larigauderie, Diane S. Srivastava & Shahid Naeem, Biodiversity loss and its impact
on humanity, Nature, June 7, 2012, 486, pp 59-67
Cadotte, M. W., B. J. Cardinale, and T. H. Oakley. 2008. Evolutionary history and the
effect of biodiversity on plant productivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 105:17012-17017.
Cavender-Bares, J., K. H. Kozak, P. V. A. Fine, and S. W. Kembel. 2009. The merging of
community ecology and phylogenetic biology. Ecology Letters 12:693-715.
Isbell, F., V. Calcagno, A. Hector, J. Connolly, W. S. Harpole, P. B. Reich, M. SchererLorenzen, B. Schmid, D. Tilman, J. v. Ruijven, A. Weigelt, B. J. Wilsey, E. S. Zavaleta,
and M. Loreau. 2011. High plant diversity is needed to maintain ecosystem services.
Nature 477:199–202.
Kareiva, Heather Tallis, Taylor H. Ricketts, Gretchen C. Daily, and Stephen Polasky,
Natural Capital: Theory and Practice of Mapping Ecosystem ServicesPeter, Oxford
University Press (2011)
http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/InVEST.html
Petit, R. e. J., J. Carlson, A. L. Curtu, M.-L. Loustau, C. Plomion, A. Gonzalez-Rodrıguez,
V. Sork, and A. Ducousso. 2013. Fagaceae trees as models to integrate
ecology, evolution and genomics: IUFRO Conference, Genetics of Fagaceae
and Nothofagaceae, in Bordeaux, France, October 2012. New Phytologist
197:369–371.