Why is biodiversity important

1
Why is biodiversity important
We are completely dependent upon biodiversity for
our survival

• Biodiversity spans Genes, Species, ecosystems
• It is vital in ensuring we (and any everything
  else) have
• Food
• Agriculture
• Water

2
Whats the problem?
We are destroying our life support system

• We have embarked on bigger, faster mass
  extinction of life on the planet than event of
  65m years ago
• Species disappearing at gt100 times natural rate
• gt5,000 animal species currently face extinction
• 45 forests already gone, deforestation
  increasing (home to majority of worlds
  terrestrial biodiversity)
• 30 coral reefs to collapse in next decade
• Public awareness
• Economists
• Politicians
• Time

Sources UNEP, IUCN, GBIF, Sir D. King U.
Cambridge Lecture
3
Solution requires joint response

• Needs political decisions/pressure
• Needs public awareness
• Needs better understanding of true scale of
  problem
• All require better data
• Better data requires significant, global
  application of IT (from sensors to database
  federation to machine learning to modelling)
• Challenge is so vast that scientific community
  alone cannot tackle it needs IT industry to get
  far more involved
• Governments, NGOs, scientific community, industry
  must work together fast!

4
Why Microsoft

• Why not?
• Microsoft Microsoft research have some of the
  database, federation, Web services tools needed
  to make the first, basic, steps happen
• We (Microsoft Research) have research ongoing in
  computational sciences that will support this
  well
• We are embarking on building a scientific
  computing workbench for 2010 with the European
  science community, which will be valuable to the
  biodiversity community / challenge in taking the
  next steps
• Its one of the most important issues the world
  faces
• We can learn some interesting lessons

5
Living Planet Project

• Data acquisition
• Data combination / management
• Data manipulation / analysis tools
• Modelling

eco-informatics Toolkit
UN GBIF Cardiff
Citizen science applications
Cambridge Southampton
Microsoft Research
Campinas IBAMA
Public awareness