Conservation International wants to use some of the new grant to train local people in how to develop scientifically and economically based conservation strategies for their regions. The plan is to establish Centers for Biodiversity Conservation—the first four in the Andes, Brazil and the Guianas, Madagascar, and Melanesia. These will also provide a base from which to mobilize the scientific community.
Conservation International also plans to create a global network of research field stations that will monitor and track changes and trends within tropical forest ecosystems.
The money will help create an "early warning system for biodiversity," said Fonseca. "Currently we don't have any stations for tracking biodiversity or a standard way to measure and track the effects of human activities on plant and animal populations," he said.
Fonseca noted, for instance, that a decline in amphibian populations was found rather serendipitously to be a global phenomenon when an international group of scientists were discussing local phenomena and many reported seeing declining frog populations in their own regions.
Through standardized monitoring by a network of field stations, global trends such as these could be identified more quickly, he said.
National Geographic Today, 7 p.m. ET/PT in the United States, is a daily news magazine available only on the National Geographic Channel. Click here to request it.
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
