The more we learn about the Earth’s ecosystems, the more we discover how elegantly, beautifully and mind-numbingly complex are the interactions among humans, animals, plants and their environment. Life, it turns out, really does come with myriad butterfly effects.
That’s what makes a project just getting under way in the South Pacific so ambitious and fascinating: A U.S.-French research team led by biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, is setting out to take a genetic inventory of an entire island’s ecosystem — every form of life that’s larger than a microbe.
“This is the first effort to catalog and barcode an entire tropical ecosystem, from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the mountains,” said George Roderick, UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management, and one of the project’s principal investigators. “We’re constructing a library of genetic markers and physical identifiers for every species of plant, animal and fungi on the island, then making that database publicly available as a resource for ecologists and evolutionary biologists around the world.”
The island in question is Moorea, a 51-square-mile island that includes coral reefs, tropical forests and mountains. Researchers believe the island is small enough for them to realistically genetically catalog and bar-code while complex enough that their model will eventually apply to larger ecosystems around the world.
Moorea is home to at least 5,000 different species of animals, plants and fungi, although Chris Meyer, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian Institute, said, “I’d be disappointed if we don’t hit at least 10,000 species.”
Project investigators say they believe the three-year project, funded by a $5.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, could eventually shed light on the larger environmental issues we’re facing worldwide. An in-depth inventory of Moorea’s coral reefs could provide more information on the impacts of climate change, they say, while data on invasive species could offer insights into the effects of globalization. The Moorea catalog of life could also help locals better understand their own impacts on the environment from overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction and other activities.
“Virtually all the ecosystems in the world are under these same stresses, and how they are responding to them is what we need to understand,” Neil Davies, the project’s lead principal investigator and executive director of the Gump Station, one of the National Science Foundation’ long-term ecological research sites. “Like the Human Genome Project, however, this unprecedented accomplishment is, in some ways, merely a necessary first step. Its goal is to accelerate progress on the larger questions: how to maintain a healthy ecosystem and what to do when things go wrong.”
What knowledge might we eventually gain from the Moorea project? I’m guessing the more the research team learns, the more we’ll discover how much there is we still don’t know about how our complex planet operates.
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Shirley Siluk Gregory
Shirley Siluk Gregory, a transplanted Chicagoan now living in Northwest Florida, represents the progressive half of Green Options' Red, Green and Blue segment. She holds a bachelor's degree in Geological Sciences from Northwestern University but graduated in 1984, just when the market for geologists was flatter than the Florida landscape. Just as well, though: she had little interest in spending her life either in a laboratory or, heaven forbid, an oil field. So, of course, she went into journalism. After extremely low-paying but fun and educational stints at several suburban Chicago weeklies and dailies, Shirley and her then-boyfriend/now-husband Scott found themselves displaced by a media buyout and spending the next several years working as freelancers. Among their credits: The Chicago Tribune, a publication for the manufactured-housing industry, and Web Hosting Magazine, a now-defunct publication that came and went with the dotcom era. Shirley's always been concerned about nature and conservation (and an avid pack-rat, as her family can attest to), but became even more rabidly interested in the environment primarily due to two factors: the growing signs that global warming was real and threatening, and the birth of her son, Noah, in 2003. Suddenly, the prospect of a world that might not be quite as habitable in 40 or 50 years took on a whole new, and personal, meaning. Living where she lives now also helped light the fire of Shirley's environmental awareness: her hometown was severely damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and beaten up again by Hurricane Dennis in 2005. That, and the fact that she and her family were vacationing in New Orleans until the day before Katrina -- and spent 12 hours driving home for a trip that normally takes 3 -- has made Shirley deeply appreciate how fragile our lifestyles are, and how dependent they are on sound management of natural resources and sustainable living practices. That's why she's become a passionate reader and writer about all things green and sustainable.
2 Responses to Know Your Ecosystem, Save Your Ecosystem
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you should have given more information
I want to know how I can get help to stop someone very powerful from digging out corals from the surrounding area my clans owned.It is affecting our livelihood from the sea. This is a place in the Fiji Islands.