Hi reddit!
My name is Christian Schwägerl, and I write for Yale Environment 360 magazine. In my work as a journalist and book author, I have covered science, environment and politics for more than 20 years. In recent years, my main focus is the Anthropocene, the now widely known idea that our human impact on Earth is not only profound and global, but also long-lasting enough to be put on the geological time-scale. My book "The Anthropocene" (Synergetic, 2014) explores pathways towards an Anthropocene that is better than today's destructive and degenerative practicies. In my recent Yale Environment 360 investigation, "Vanishing Act: Why Insects are declining and why it matters", scientists Rodolfo Dirzo and Wägele J. Wolfgang join me to understand why the dwindling insect populations was really disconcerting in this respect. Not only do insect populations decline, but monitoring and research fall far behind what would be necessary to really understand and address the problem. Like with so many other things we take for granted, the small and invisible is hugely important. An extinct bug might make most people shrug. But our lives depend more on healthy insect ecology than we think. In future articles, I want to explore the huge importance of small organisms further.
My name is Rodolfo Dirzo and I am an ecologist at Stanford University. My work examines the study of species interactions in tropical ecosystems from Latin America and Africa. My recent research highlights the decline of animal life (“defaunation”), and how this affects ecosystem processes/services. I developed a global index for invertebrate abundance that showed a 45 percent decline over the last four decades, published in 2014 in Science, "Defaunation in the Anthropocene."
My name is Wägele J. Wolfgang and I am a biologist and Director of the Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany. With the help of my team, I have developed a plan for an automated biodiversity surveillance system, which would photograph, videotape, capture, or audio-record animal and insect species and perform automatic analysis of species richness and abundance. We have weather stations for climate research all over the country, so we want to add a dense network of biodiversity stations so we can measure automatically how much life there is in our landscapes. We plan to use automated identification techniques, either through artificial intelligence image analysis or genetic fingerprinting, or by matching acoustic recordings with data collections. This system could collect, identify, and record species data 24/7 and gather data we desperately need to assess the decline of insects.
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