The vast majority of the Earth's plants, animals and microorganisms still do not have scientific names, nor do we know their natural history, functional roles, or the genetic and biochemical resources they contain. Because these organisms provide human beings with a livable planet by producing oxygen, degrading wastes, cleaning the air and water, providing food, building materials and pharmaceuticals, and a whole host of other ecosystem services, there is a pressing need to determine the dimensions of the unknown biodiversity that surrounds us. A large proportion of the coordination and support that serves as the foundation for biodiversity research is provided by non-governmental organizations and institutions. This project will support a workshop activity to bring together representatives from this research community to: 1)Develop a compendium of the kinds of enabling support currently being provided; 2)Identify significant gaps in this support; 3) Propose mechanisms to fill those gaps; and 4) Develop strategies for strengthening communication and cooperation among the various elements of the community.
Approximately forty individuals, representing support networks for elements of biodiversity research from around the world, will engage in two days of discussions, to consider the key scientific questions that should guide exploration of the Earth's unknown dimensions of biodiversity. Workshop participants will examine what is the current capacity (including human resources) needed to support biodiversity research, and what are the major gaps in the support infrastructure. The workshop will be held on December 1-2, 2009 at the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington DC. The results of the workshop will be made available as a report that will be posted for comment soon after the workshop has been completed and distributed to participants and interested parties.
The world is experiencing unprecedented and accelerating losses of species, ecosystems and genetic (collectively known as biological diversity or biodiversity). This situation has perilous consequences for humanity, which depends on life’s richness and variety for our very existence. Global trends of population growth, climatic disruption and unsustainable economic activity are driving major losses of irretrievable knowledge and resources. Our knowledge of life on Earth is relatively meager. It is likely that much of life on Earth will vanish before it can be characterized, let alone understood. Vast storehouses of resources and the knowledge of those resources are endangered. With this background, the National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated a 10-year research initiative, "Dimensions of Biodiversity". The purpose of the initiative is to generate breakthrough discoveries regarding the nature of life on Earth. In support of this initiative, the National Council for Science and the (NCSE) and its partners, US National Committee for DIVERSITAS of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the Encyclopedia of Life of the Smithsonian Institution convened a two-day workshop, "Enabling Biodiversity Research: the Roles of Information and Support Networks" in December 2009 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The approximately 60 participants represented 65 leading national and international biodiversity research institutions, most of which focus on building the information and other resources and services that are critical for biodiversity research. These services include housing scientific collections, generating and sharing information, and providing funding and other types of support. The workshop, including background surveys, found this research-enabling community, while containing many dedicated individuals and excellent institutions, is not sufficiently funded, organized nor large enough to meet the challenges of understanding biodiversity in time to avoid catastrophic losses of life’s richness. There is a serious scarcity of biodiversity researchers and supporting organizations in the tropics, which contain the vast majority of biodiversity. It is important that researchers and supporting organizations around the world band together to enable and undertake a Multi-dimensional Research Program for Global Biodiversity. The coming decades will challenge research communities and the research infrastructures they have built to grow across the traditional boundaries that have separated them. Participants in the workshop agreed that a new generation of ‘multi-dimensional’ research is needed to understand the relationships and processes that link genes, gene expression, development, physiology, population and community ecology, speciation, ecosystem functioning, and other dimensions of biodiversity. Research infrastructures, especially reference collections and databases, will need to expand their missions and programs of work. In addition to providing access to comprehensive resources on one dimension of biodiversity (such as genetics), infrastructures will need to develop ways for researchers to navigate from the information sources they usually use into other dimensions, to support a new generation of research. The workshop report, responses to a pre-workshop inquiry, and related background material about biodiversity and biodiversity science can be found at www.NCSEonline.org/biodiversity .
