We cannot Conserve Biodiversity that we don’t Know
“Biodiversity is nature itself – all living creatures and plants, and the ecosystems of which they form part. It is not only very important as a source of food, medicines, and natural resources, but also has great spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic significance.”
Surprisingly, this isn’t the statement of a biologist or an environmental activist; it’s from the CEO of an oil company. The declaration captures how intuitive the concept of biodiversity is.
Our relationship with biodiversity is far from straightforward. We cherish our pets but recoil from insects. Bacteria in our gut aid digestion, while other strains can prove deadly.
However, biodiversity brings resilience to an otherwise chaotic biosphere.
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos,”
E. O. Wilson
said the famous zoologist E. O. Wilson, to emphasize just how integral biodiversity is to the equilibrium of life on Earth.
We need Biodiversity and its conservation is important.
Nevertheless, the more I delve into studying biodiversity, the more I realize how little we actually know about it.
The Illusory Concept of “Species”
To start, the cornerstone of biodiversity, the concept of “species,” is far from universal or concrete. The popular definition comes from Ernst Mayr, articulated in the 1960s: “groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” However, this definition falls short in several contexts: it is not applicable to Asexual Organisms and is impractical for Geographically Isolated Populations.
In essence, species are not a discovery of Nature but an invention of human classification systems. It’s taxonomists—biologists specialized in the classification of organisms—who decide what constitutes a species. If you’ve ever met a taxonomist, you’d know they bring their own set of opinions to the table.
As one commentator pointedly observed, “Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.” This captures the contentious nature of species identification and classification.
We must acknowledge that our understanding of biodiversity is fundamentally flawed from the outset, starting with our very definition of its basic unit.
Uncertainty in the Number of Species
“So we don’t know how many species are still to be discovered?” “Oh, no. No idea.”
The complexity of cataloging life has left us with vast uncertainties about the number of existing species.
From Aristotle’s first attempts to modern molecular biology, classification systems have been fraught with inconsistency and ambiguity. There’s no consensus even within specialized fields. Numbers for known types of fungi range from 70,000 to 100,000; earthworms from 4,000 to 12,000; insects from 750,000 to 950,000; and plants from 248,000 to 265,000.
“In principle, you ought to be able to go to experts in each area of specialization, ask how many species there are in their fields, then add the totals. Many people have in fact done so. The problem is that seldom do any two come up with matching figures.”
“In The Diversity of Life, he estimated the number of known species of all types—plants, insects, microbes, algae, everything—at 1.4 million, but added that that was just a guess. Other authorities have put the number of known species slightly higher, at around 1.5 million to 1.8 million, but there is no central registry of these things, so nowhere to check numbers.”
“Others using the same or similar data have come up with figures of 13 million, 80 million, or 100 million insect types, underlining the conclusion that however carefully arrived at, such figures inevitably owe at least as much to supposition as to science.”
Despite significant financial interest in the matter, even billionaire-backed initiatives like the All Species Foundation have struggled to make headway.
“And so it became kind of a call of existing species. And that was the thing that shocked us was, okay, first we need is we need a list of all the existing species. This is whatever this is, 2000 feet or something. There isn’t one. It was like, what? Well, there’s all these taxonomic publications that are all buried in these obscure publications that haven’t been digitized yet. So it was like, oh my gosh, this is even further behind than we thought.”
Kevin Kelly
Despite numerous attempts to consolidate knowledge: the All Species Foundation, the Encyclopedia of Life, the Global Biodiversity Identification Foundation, and initiatives like Biodiversa+ by the European Union; a central, comprehensive catalog of species remains elusive.
The inconsistency in data makes it nearly impossible to make informed decisions about the safety of any biological project.
Uncertainty in Species Abundance
Estimating the abundance of species is a colossal challenge. The sheer size of the Earth and the computational resources required make it virtually impossible to count individual organisms.
The Earth is a patchwork of diverse ecosystems—mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, hot springs, and icy terrains—which add another layer of complexity to species counting. This spatial heterogeneity limits the scope and accuracy of any sampling efforts.
Even within these diverse environments, the distribution of species isn’t uniform. Organisms congregate around specific microclimates and resource hubs, adding further to the complexity of an already daunting task.
Given these challenges, our understanding of species abundance is often biased. It’s influenced by taxonomists’ expertise, the methods used for sampling, and accessibility to various environments.
Existing methodologies like visual counts in quadrants in forests are plagued with high variance and limitations.
The inherent flaws in these counting methods make any numbers derived from them questionable at best. Accepting such numbers without scrutinizing the methodologies behind them equates to a lack of understanding of the complexities involved.
Time to change the paradigm?
The perpetuation of a biodiversity strategy that is being proven faulty is the failure to achieve its main goal, that is its conservation.
The prevailing strategy for conserving biodiversity, intuitively or for lack of alternative, has been territorial protection.
This has been, however, not only complex and expensive but also inefficient. Evidence shows that protecting and effectively managing all terrestrial sites of global conservation significance would cost US$76 billion annually.
Even well-intentioned international agreements, such as the 2010 commitment to 20 biodiversity conservation targets by 2020, struggle with funding. Estimates like those by McCarthy et al. suggest costs of $4 billion per year for two targets, and $58 billion per year for broader protection.
However, the belief that protecting the environment inherently protects species is misleading. As David Deutsch argues, the biosphere may not be as accommodating to species as we like to think, challenging the premise that environmental protection equates to species conservation.
In ‘Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct?’ Costello et al. show estimates of how many species we are losing every year, even with all the efforts to conserve territory. They believe, however, that if we invest more in the same strategy, we science will describe most species within this century, and suggest how this complete description can be facilitated. I’m SKEPTICAL.
I’m more in line with Antonio Carlos Diegues, who in “The Modern Myth of Untouched Nature,” criticizes this method for being more about human reconnection to nature than effective conservation.
The current paradigm for biodiversity is unsustainable and it has to change.
The scientific community often leans on existing paradigms not because they are indisputably correct, but because challenging them could result in unintended consequences—whether it’s loss of research funding or changes in public opinion on conservation.
For me, the role of biologists should be to question and redefine existing paradigms, rather than simply perpetuating them.
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