\u00a0<\/strong>\u201c Our report examined three key areas: Canada\u2019s taxonomic expertise; the state\u00a0of biodiversity collections; and access to data about Canadian biodiversity.\u00a0 After assessing the evidence in each of these areas we concluded that Canada is not yet equipped to fully understand the challenges of its biodiversity resources.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cEven in Canada, one third of all species are still unknown to science. I also had the honor to chair this past year the Review of the 3rd\u00a0Global Biodiversity Outlook and basically, its pretty grim prospect, unless things change in terms of human behavior.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically as a friend of mine said recently – the last time we looked, we were a biological species. That means we are very dependent on the web of life, both for things we harvest immediately, whether it be a fish species we eat as seafood, or whether it is in terms of some ecosystem service, like the provision of clean water and reliable water supply, pollination to important crops and the like.<\/p>\n
We found some trends that clearly need to be addressed. One is the Canadian contribution to describing new species has dropped from being sixth in the world to 14th\u00a0in the last decade. We\u2019ve visited a number of museums and collections and there\u2019s no question they are a national treasure \u2013 sometimes housed in the most modern of conditions, other times not – but mostly, the information those collections represent is trapped in the museum cabinets and not easily available on the internet. So that\u2019s one of the big challenges in an area in which Canada is falling behind. The taxonomic enterprise in Canada is slipping at just the moment when it needs to surge forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Dr. Sarah Otto, Professor and Director of the Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia<\/strong><\/p>\n(Taxonomist as Sleuth)<\/p>\n
\u201cTaxonomy is the science that discovers, distinguishes and classifies\u00a0and documents\u00a0\u00a0living things. As such, taxonomy is the foundation of biodiversity research and essential to understanding the world around us. I personally like to think of taxonomists as the detectives of the biological world.\u00a0\u00a0Just as detectives use fingerprints of photographs or DNA analysis to identify their culprits, taxonomists use distinguishing features and DNA to identify the species \u2013 and like detectives, taxonomists have to do a lot of sleuthing in order to find their culprit.<\/span><\/p>\n(The Lesson of the Sea Squirt)<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cOne example to bring this home is the invasive marine sea squirt \u2013 a rapidly growing tunicate that completely over-grows oyster beds, aquaculture equipment, docks and native species. This invasive species is a master of disguise and was misidentified as 8 different species over the years. It took an expert taxonomist, Gretchen Lambert of Friday Harbor Lab, to identify it correctly\u2026 Now that we know which species it is: Dr. Lambert was able to identify where it came from –and that\u2019s from Japan and the waters around Japan–. She was also able to identify the likely culprit that transported the sea squirt around the world –and that was on ships either through the ballast or in ships holds–. And that will allow us to improve policies about reducing the risk of invasive species with ship traffic.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Taxonomists are essential in the fight against invasive species)<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we don\u2019t have taxonomists in place, then we either fail to identify invasive species or identify them too late to properly tackle them. And this happened to us in Canada with the brown spruce longhorn beetle.<\/p>\n
Taxonomists are critical for identifying and protecting species at risk. We can only protect that which we know about and we only know a small fraction of the species on earth. It has been estimated there are 5-10 million species on earth and we only have records of about 1.6 million of these species. Their extinction rate is dramatically higher than historical records. Current estimates state that species are going extinct 1000 times faster than historically.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. David Green, Director of the Redpath Museum at McGill University<\/strong><\/p>\nHere, at the Redpath Museum, we have a specimen of an Eastern cougar. It was collected\u00a0in 1859 in southern Quebec and it\u2019s the last, real, true, verified Eastern cougar that was ever seen in Canada! How could I get another one? But it\u2019s a value because we can get DNA from it,\u00a0we can study it, we can understand it\u00a0and know what the real animal looked like.<\/p>\n
So specimens contained within collections from\u00a0across the country are a legacy of our lands and waters as they have been and are today. They are the product of past research work, that is true, but they are also the basis for future work.<\/p>\n
Dr. Luc Brouillet, Curator of the Marie-Victorin Herbarium, University of Montreal<\/strong><\/p>\nAccess to biodiversity data in a timely manner is extremely restricted within Canada, compromising our ability to address important issues.\u00a0 Canada\u2019s collection contain more than 50 million specimens but less than 10% of this collection data is available online.\u00a0 This dearth of computerized collection data comes from a lack of consistent investment. There is currently no incentive for investing in the digitization of our collections.<\/p>\n
Disclaimer: The information and\/or opinions expressed are supplied by such individual or organization\u00a0and\u00a0do not necessarily represent the views of SMCC or any other person or organization unless otherwise specifically stated. SMCC,\u00a0its directors, officers, affiliates, agents and content providers assume no liability for any inaccurate, delayed or incomplete information or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The state of biodiversity research in Canada – November 17, 2010 The Council of Canadian Academies released an expert panel report on Thursday, November 18th 2010 at 7am EST. \u00a0The report is an assessment of biodiversity science and taxonomy in Canada. To help media cover this event, the SMCC organized an embargoed web conference with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[168],"tags":[174,170,171,173],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-webinar","tag-animals","tag-biodiversity","tag-ecology","tag-webinar-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4DqbN-3z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}