The Missing Pieces in the 6th Mass Extinction

Recent biodiversity reports point to a drastic drop in species across the world, but on the local scale the results are more mixed. We're also missing data from some of the key ecosystems on our planet. In order to fight off the 6th mass extinction, we need more data to get a complete picture of the state of life on Earth.
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In recent years, reports on extinction and biodiversity loss have pointed toward a global drop in species. Back in 2019, hundreds of researchers from a UN-backed international organization found that one million species of fauna and flora are at risk of extinction. Experts estimate that today’s extinction rate is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the ‘background’ rate. Measuring biodiversity losses is incredibly complicated, especially because there’s no standard way to do it.

The most common way to track biodiversity is to measure species richness, or count the number of species in a particular place and time. And they also only capture certain facets of biodiversity. Depending on what metric you use, you could get completely different results. When it comes to conservation efforts or biodiversity offsets—when developers measure biodiversity loss for a project—how we measure biodiversity can really make a difference.

On top of that, global averages don’t always reflect biodiversity variation on a local scale. It's important to look locally since biodiversity affects how ecosystems impact water supply, fuel, pollination, food, and more for their surrounding regions. And what researchers are finding is pretty surprising. Turns out, local biodiversity measures are incredibly mixed and some ecosystems are doing even better than we might expect.

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Read More:
The Biodiversity Crisis Needs Its Net Zero Moment
https://www.wired.com/story/2021-biodiversity-crisis/
The last time the parties of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity got together to set a global biodiversity agenda was in Japan in 2010, where they came up with the Aichi targets, a set of 20 goals aimed at reducing a range of environmental harms including habitat loss, overfishing, and pollution over the subsequent decade. But those goals were difficult to measure, and countries weren’t required to report their progress in any definite way.

BioTIME
https://biotime.st-andrews.ac.uk/
BioTIME is a comprehensive collection of assemblage time-series in which the abundances of the species that comprise ecological communities have been monitored over a number of years. BioTIME data span the globe and encompass land and seas; they also include freshwater systems.

Airborne DNA Can Reveal Earth’s Biodiversity
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/airborne-dna-can-reveal-earths-biodiversity/
These projects have crept along because of the painstaking work of identifying and describing species—as well as, in many cases, collecting samples of the organisms for DNA sequencing. Now a new approach to cataloguing the world’s animals has emerged: vacuuming DNA out of thin air.
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