“Save the rainforests” is a snappy slogan, but it doesn’t tell the full story of how complicated it is to do just that.
“Save the rainforests” is a snappy slogan, but it doesn’t tell the full story of how complicated it is to do just that. Before conservationists can even begin restoring habitats and advocating for laws that protect land from poachers and loggers, scientists need to figure out what’s living, what’s dying, and which patterns explain why. Tackling these questions—in other words, finding out what drives a region’s biodiversity—is no small task.
The better we measure what’s in these rainforests, the more likely we are to find patterns that inform conservation efforts. A new study in Biotropica, for instance, crunched numbers on a behemoth dataset on small mammals in South America and found something surprising in the process: that climate may affect biodiversity in rainforests even more than deforestation does.
Noé de la Sancha, a scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago, professor at Chicago State University, and the paper’s lead author, stresses that changing how we measure biodiversity can uncover patterns like these.
Read more at Field Museum
