Biodiversity

Humans have physically reconfigured half of the world’s land to grow just eight staple crops: maize (corn), soy, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, sweet potato and potato. They account for the vast majority of calories that people around the world consume. As global population rises, there’s pressure to expand production even further. Many experts argue that further expanding modern industrialized agriculture – which relies heavily on synthetic fertilizer, chemical pesticides and high-yield seeds – isn’t the right way to feed a growing world population. In their view, this approach isn’t sustainable ecologically or economically, and farmers and scientists alike feel trapped within this system. Corn’s evolution into a global commodity shows how industrialized agriculture has transformed farming. How can societies develop a food system that meets their needs and is also more healthy and diverse? It has p...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Is there life in the sea that hasn’t been discovered? – Haven W., age 12, McKinney, Texas Imagine going to a place on Earth where no one has ever been. There are many locations like that in the ocean, which covers more than 70% of our planet. In the ocean, creatures live at many different depths, just as animals and birds live at different heights in a forest. Every ocean life form has to find a way to gather nourishment, reproduce and contribute to an ecological community. The ocean is thousands of feet deep in many areas and offers millions of opportunities for life to thrive. Biologists don’t know how many species live in the ocean, but they estimate that fewer than 10% have been described. Black and white sm...

Some of the world’s most popular museums are natural history collections: Think of dinosaur fossils, gemstones and preserved animals. Herbaria – collections of pressed, dried plant specimens – are a less-known but important type of natural history collection. There are some 400 million botanical specimens stored across over 3,500 herbaria around the world, but most are not widely publicized and rarely host public exhibits. I study biodiversity and global change, and these collections have fueled my work. My collaborators and I have used herbarium collections to study how flowering times respond to changes in climate, how dispersal traits and environmental preferences affect the likelihood that plants will become invasive, and how fires affect tropical biodiversity. I have had easy access to specimens from every corner of the world, but most researchers are not as lucky. This is partly because herbaria as we know them today are largely a European creation. And...

Humans rely on the ocean for many things, including food, jobs, recreation and stabilization of Earth’s climate. But although ocean resources may seem infinite, human impacts like pollution, overfishing and climate change are creating what United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called an “ocean emergency.” Climate change is pushing ocean temperatures to record levels, many fisheries are overharvested, and plastic waste is accumulating in the deep sea. These five articles from The Conversation’s archive spotlight urgent challenges for ocean conservation, and describe what researchers are doing to devise effective responses. 1. A devastating invasion is expanding Invasive lionfish are aggressive predators, native to the Indo-Pacific Ocean, that feed on smaller reef fish. They have caused heavy damage in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico since they first appeared in the Atlantic in 1985. Now, they’ve spread south to Brazil, which ha...

Driving north on state Highway 66 through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, it’s easy to miss a small herd of bison lounging just off the road behind an 8-foot fence. Each winter, heavy snows drive bison out of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park – the only place in the U.S. where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times – and into Montana, where they are either killed or shipped off to tribal lands to avoid conflict with cattle ranchers. In the winter of 2022-2023 alone, over 1,500 bison have been “removed,” about 25% of Yellowstone’s entire population. The bison at Fort Belknap are refugees that have been trucked 300 miles to the reservation from past Yellowstone winter culls. Although bison are the U.S. national mammal, they exist in small and fragmented populations across the West. The federal government is working to restore healthy wild bison populations, relying heavily on sovereign tribal lands...