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posted by chromas on Tuesday July 24 2018, @12:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the NOAA dept.

Phys.org:

[C]onservation biologists often use species' evolutionary history – their phylogeny – to identify groups of species to save."

This idea is based on the assumption that preserving phylogenetic diversity among species preserves more functional diversity than selecting species to preserve by chance. Functional diversity is important, Pearse says, because it drives ecosystem health and productivity.

"Yet measuring the effectiveness of functional diversity is difficult," he says. "So using phylogenetic diversity as a surrogate for functional diversity has made conservation biology much easier and more effective."

Building an ark to help the Earth weather ecosystem collapse has become a recurrent element of science fiction. How best would one go about it in practice?


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  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 24 2018, @06:25AM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 24 2018, @06:25AM (#711615) Homepage Journal

    You say that like it's a bad thing.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 24 2018, @11:38AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @11:38AM (#711671)

    There's a lot of good that comes from a catastrophic cleanse, but it's really unpleasant to live through.

    As a species, we've only been really showing off for the last 100 years - 10,000 if you want to be generous. I would hope that we can demonstrate enough intelligence to not put ourselves down a painful hole for the next 100,000.

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