Comments on: The Mathematics of Biodiversity (Part 6)

By: John Baez

John Baez — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 14:19:23 +0000

Latin names for species seem like idea—at least, universal names for species seem like a good idea, and so far they’re in Latin, so let’s stick with that. Writing out species identification reports in Latin seems like overkill, at least nowadays. And I say this despite my fondness for the archaic traditions rooted in the classics!

There are just too many species being discovered these days—2000 species of plants, algae and fungi each year—for us to force all the discovers to learn Latin. As Lou Jost puts it, now the golden age for discovering new plant species. 20 years from now all the last patches of undisturbed forest will be well-documented or destroyed… or both.

By: romain

romain — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 13:00:35 +0000

Of course, by “your work” I was mentioning the collective work of all the people who were at this conference in Barcelona defining measures of biodiversity. Anyway, it would be great to hear Lou Jost talking here about his active strategy to help protect biodiversity, why he opted for such strategy with Ecominga, etc… It would make a very nice link with the mathematics.

By: John Baez

John Baez — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 11:23:46 +0000

It’s really Lou Jost’s work on biodiversity measures that can make this more precise! He and the statistician Anne Chao have been working on this for years, and now mathematicians like Tom Leinster, Christina Cobbold and others at this conference are getting involved. It’s pretty exciting! I’ll have to blog more about it, though now I’m back in Singapore and getting distracted by other things.

By: romain

romain — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 11:00:08 +0000

This is a great project by Lou Jost! It’s nice to hear about it.
It seems to sit on one end of the spectrum of conservation: fully protecting a small area, as opposed to (somewhat) loosely protecting a large area, as National Parks do all over the world.

Maybe this is where mathematicians can be helpful: by computing, for a given amount of money, how to select between these two strategies to preserve the most biodiversity. In small areas where there are endemic species, it may of course be worth fully protecting (see for example the very small island of Escudo de Veraguas, only home of the pygmy sloth). However, in other regions, it may be better to protect larger areas.

Your work on biodiversity measures can probably make all this more precise. How about an entropy per km²?

By: Michelle Beissel

Michelle Beissel — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:59:14 +0000

Wow! No idea that botanists were once required to report their findings in Latin!

I have had a couple of gardens in different countries, and the Latin names for plants always comes in handy as common names can be different for the same plant from country to country causing much confusion.