The Biodiversity Collections Crisis – “You might be familiar with the concept of the present “biodiversity crisis“. There is an increasing consensus in the ecological research community that the current loss of species this planet is experiencing is not sustainable, in the sense that the loss of some species may precipitate the loss of more, in an accelerating spiral. The paleontological community has found that the pattern of species loss is unusual even at the scale of geological time, potentially placing us among the great extinctions in geologic history, or at least a notably bad extinction event. A less diverse biosphere means the loss of ecosystem services associated with all of the species we lose, and potentially a less resilient biosphere, stacking the deck against us as the climate continues to change and life is forced to adapt. Because our global civilization depends on the wealth of the biosphere for our own well-being, this is definitely very bad news for humanity (I usually tend to avoid rationalizing conservation based on ecosystems’ value to us, believing that we have a moral imperative to preserve the biosphere, and organisms have an inherent right to exist outside of their economic value, but that’s a topic for another blog). We are only aware of the loss of species due to centuries of careful collecting, cataloging, categorization and curation undertaken by conservationists around the world, including indigenous communities, museum professionals, taxonomists, seed banks, herbaria, and other very highly specialized and educated people. I won’t refer to these biodiversity experts as “countless”, because they’re actually a pretty small group of folks entrusted with an almost incomprehensible responsibility: to quantify the biological wealth of our world. They figure out when baselines are shifting, and their work keeps us accountable as we seek to stop the current bleeding of biodiversity.