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Foresight, hindsight and biodiversity

Posted on July 21st, 2010 by EditorPatHeslopHarrison

Brazilian Cerrado Vegetation
Brazilian Cerrado Vegetation
I was looking at the downloads of papers from Annals of Botany over the last year. In the top ten of most downloaded papers was one from 1997 (certainly when I relied on photocopiers rather than PDFs). It was on the Brazilian cerrado vegetation and threats to its biodiversity. I expect this was a paper long before its time, but now the threats to the diversity of this ecosystem are becoming recognized widely. Hopefully we are in time to conserve the 160,000 species the paper estimates are present in this diversity hotspot.

The Brazilian Cerrado Vegetation and Threats to its Biodiversity
J. A. RATTER, J. F. RIBEIROŒ and S. BRIDGEWATER Annals of Botany 80: 223±230, 1997

Charcoal burning after clearance of cerrado vegetation
Charcoal burning after clearance of cerrado vegetation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Foresight, hindsight and biodiversity”

EditorPatHeslopHarrison • September 17th, 2010 at 9:41 am

Brazil’s cerrado wins protection, but will it be enough to save the wildlife-rich grassland?
mongabay.com
September 15, 2010
Brazil announced a plan to protect the cerrado, the vast woody savanna that covers 20 percent of the country but has become the nation’s biggest single source of carbon emissions due to conversion for agriculture and cattle pasture, reports Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment.
Unveiled today in Brasilia, the $200 million initiative establishes the “political framework for the conservation and sustainable use of the most threatened biome in Brazil,” according to a statement released by the ministry …
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0915-cerrado_consservation.html

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