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GREEN EXPO FOR EARTH DAY 2010 By Calliope Lexington

A Polar Bear and a Mantis among the audience, an Orca walking

through the sim: no wonder, that happened at the first Green Expo for Earth Day 2010, organized by Galaxy Fleet Command in Second Life. A fortnight of films, treasure hunt, concerts, lectures and installations from April 18th to May 2nd. “We are a Star Trek role-playing group, and we are deeply concerned in the preservation of our planet and its life forms”, Gandalf Nakamura says, reminding the yearning for homecoming on the waste earth, in spite of the excitement of journeying “where no man has gone before”. A display of the most beautiful places on earth in the holodeck celebrated “what we risk losing”, Gandalf adds.

Other groups taking part in the exhibit were Second Physics, the Italian group founded by Talete Flanagan for the dissemination of science in SL, and NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The latter provided an exhibition on science on sphere and on the alternative and renewable fuels. A lecture by Christian Zifanwe, GFC, was also devoted to the “Renewable energy and implementation”, while Gandalf Nakamura talked on “Ozone and chemical reactions in the atmosphere”, showing with a wealth of data how serious the problem of the destruction of the ozone layer is and how difficult to solve, for want of political will.

Whatever the specific themes chosen by each single group, the expo showed how every element is connected to every other in the world. Second Physics presented a number of panels on deforestation, biodiversity, water, global warming, ozone hole and a lecture on “Biodiversity” given by Noke Yuitza, member of “Second Physics” and founder of “Open Science”, the one which follows. What the humans are doing is “silencing the songs of the wild life, cord to cord, instrument to instrument, note to note, until only remains the pure echo of which once it was the music of the life”, Noke starts, quoting Briant Vincent, spokesman of the conservationist movement. Biodiversity is a symphony where each instrument contributes to the creation of melody and rhythm. This poetical metaphor renders the idea of how even the smallest and apparently unimportant element contributes to the functioning of the living world.

The extinction of an animal or vegetal species causes the loss of food and habitat for other species living in an ecosystem, where they form an interactive community between them. The exponential increase of the human species in the last centuries and “the bad management on polluting technologies and the economic interests” are causes for loss of biodiversity. Conservationist actions and the preservation of the integrity of ecosystems and landscapes represent a solution. To accomplish this, a new education is necessary, to learn

how to establish different relationships with our only world.

Some images from Biodiversity lecture. Fig. 1, up: a polar bear; Fig. 2, centre: The Green Expo; Fig. 3, down: Noke Yuitza.

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BIODIVERSITY- Some Conpects By Noke Yuitza, Ciència Oberta-Open Science http://www.cienciaoberta.tk/

“Imagine that you’re listening to a great symphony (...)

the strong and sonorous call of trumpets, the frightening song of the violoncellos, the ebullient and velvety melodies of the violin, the euphoric voices of the Oboe and clarinet and the deaf blows and extinguished of the timbales.

Next, imagine that the first violins were silenced, and the violas, the tubes and flouts later, until only they were left the singsong blow deaf of the timbales.

This is what we humans are doing with the great symphony that conforms the nature (...) we are silencing the songs of the wild life, cord to cord, instrument to instrument, note to note, until only remains the pure echo of which once it was the music of the life "

Introduction I’ve chosen these words of Briant Vincent, spokesman of the conservationist movement, to start this lecture cause they reflect, in a poetical way, the meaning and the importance of biodiversity.

2010 International Biodiversity Year The United Nations proclaimed 2010 to be the

International Year of Biodiversity, and people all over the world are working to safeguard this irreplaceable natural wealth and reduce biodiversity loss.

But what is and how we can define biodiversity? What ecological factors and processes are important to maintain it? Which are the most important evolutionary factors in its generation? How we classify the endangered species for its study? And how can we determine the biodiversity of an ecosystem?

These are some of questions we are going to see today

here, in the mark of the Earth Week organized by Second Physics and GalaxyFleet Command, who had invite me to give this lecture about Some Concepts on Biodiversity.

Aloha to all the presents, I’m Noke Yuitza, and I invite you to swim with me into the biological concept of Diversity during the next hour.

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How can we define biodiversity? Dr. in Biology Montserrat Vilà Planell, in her article BIODIVERSITY: something more than a listing of species, defined biodiversity as “the variety and the variability of the alive beings in the ecological systems that lodge them”.

So we can defined biodiversity as the set of species that live arbitrarily together in a determined geographic area, forming an interactive community between them, and that it’s the result of a historical-evolutionary process that is pronounced in all the levels of organization, what includes the genetic differences within each specie and the variety of ecosystems that exist in our planet.

But how we study it? To facilitate the study of the biodiversity to the scientific

community, limiting parcels with concrete characteristics, allowing therefore a more determined analysis, we need resolution scales.

These scales go from smallest to greatest, being able to establish several fundamental levels of biological diversity as genetics, populations and species, communities, ecosystems and landscaping scales.

Each one of these scales comes defined by three

components: 1. The composition, that talks about the number of

the biological elements. 2. The structure, which explains how they change in

the space and the time. 3. The function, that explains how they interact to

each other and in what ecological processes they take part. It’s fundamental, for the practical study of the

biodiversity, to specify the degree of diversity and its components, without forgetting that their different categories are related intimately to each other.

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What ecological factors and processes are important to maintain the biodiversity?

We know that the identity, the size and the degree of landscaping heterogeneity are key factors in the conservation of ecosystems, communities, species, populations and genes.

At the time of conserving the biodiversity, we have to

consider in one hand the physical and biological factors, the category of species, the number of species and individuals (or specific wealth), and the proportion of existing sexes in a population (demographic characteristics) plus the relative abundance. And in the other hand, the environmental processes to great scale (as the fragmentation of an ecosystem, the regime of disturbance, the loss of the ground…) that can induce to extinction to certain local species when influencing in the distribution and the persistence of their populations on regional scale.

Also, we have to consider the processes that relate the members of a biocenosis or population. Some of them are the competition, the herbivores, the symbiosis, the depredation and the pollination.

Unfortunately, there are negative anthropological factors that contribute to the loss of biodiversity, as per example the continuous exponential increase of the human beings in the last centuries (according to official sources, the world-wide population human in 1999 had reached 6,000 million, the double that in 1960). Biologist Michael McKinney discovered the existence of a positive correlation between the size of the human population and the threat to the number of birds and mammals of the continental nations, being the mammals the ones that suffer greater losses during the first human impacts. But also the bad management on polluting technologies and the economic interests suppose a threat to the biological diversity, as it can be observed in the countries of the first world. We just have to look back in history and remember the petroleum spill of 1989 in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where the recovery of the ecosystem is very slow and petroleum continues damaging the wild life cause it still remains in the trophic or nutritional chain. Exxon, the guilty company of this spill, continues maintaining that “environment on Prince William Sound is healthy, full of life and fortified”. In spite of this enormous ecological disaster and the fame that acquired the case, our politicians haven’t adopted yet drastic and effective measures on the retirement of oil tankers monocoque. Due to this lack of commitment, other cases happened, as per example Prestige’s spill in the Galician coast, Spain.

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Therefore, to maintain the biodiversity, it is precise to apply political conservationists actions based on scientific studies and to carry out complementary projects to inferior levels, like for example the reintroduction of endangered species. As Dr Brian Walter said, in his article Biodiversity and ecological redundancy, “The best way to conserve biodiversity is to maintain the integrity of ecosystems and landscapes, because these categories include all the inferior ones”.

Which are the most important evolutionary factors in the generation of Biodiversity?

From a simple form of life 3.500 millions ago, to the great diversity of alive beings nowadays, evolution has had, and have, an important paper in the expression of life diversity.

But, which are the most important evolutionary factors in its generation?

The evolutionary factors that generate the biodiversity of the species are those that foment the genetic variability of a species (microevolution), so that it can adapt better to the

environmental changes and the colonization of new areas, but is the macroevolution the one that describes the events of the organic evolution on great scale.

Although the macroevolutionary models and processes

arise from the corresponding ones of the microevolution, they have certain degree of autonomy. The appearance of new adaptations and species and the variable rates of speciation and extinction, which are appraised in the fossil registry, go beyond the fluctuation of the allelic frequencies of the populations, obtaining that the ancestries with greater rates of speciation and minors of extinction produce the greater diversity of forms.

In the generation of biodiversity, the time of evolution and the climatic stability are influential evolutionary factors.

How we classify the endangered species for its study?

The study of the species classifies in five categories the endangered species: vulnerable, key, parasol, bioindicator and flagship species.

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The vulnerable species are those integrated by small populations, of low rate of natality, very variable in their density and prone to be extinguished locally. An example of this is the case of the lynx in Spain, whose population has been itself laborious and dangerously reduced until almost the total extinction of the individuals, because of the deforestation and contamination of its atmosphere, jointly with the massive hunting without control during the past century.

Key species are those whose presence is important for the maintenance of the structure of the population, determining the one of other species, independently of their abundance. In 1999, the New York Times published the article A mysterious tear in the network that conforms the life. In the article one could read how the fall of the populations of herrings and codfish, due to overfishing and climatic changes, had caused as well a pronounced diminution of the populations of marine lions and seals, that feed themselves on them, and who are the nutritional base of orcas. These cetaceans have been forced to hunt another type of prey, the sea otters, that reside in more coastal areas and less deep than those to which orcas are used to hunt. This fact caused a reduction of 90% in the number of otters, disappearing completely in some places. The otters acted like predators of sea urchins, natural predators on algae, whose massive increase puts in danger the forests of macroalgae and their associated fauna. These seaweeds are the habitat of innumerable species, like for example the marine otter, and its devastation affects to many of the life forms that depend on them.

The parasol or umbrella species are those that require great areas for their subsistence implying the conservation of their habitat, and the one of other species. It’s the case of the great flocks and wild herds, like the bison and the elephant, among others.

Biological indicators are species used to monitor the health of an environment or ecosystem.They are sensible to the disturbances or changes of the environmental quality, being their presence and changes in their abundance

reflected in all the community. One marine bioindicator is the Holoturia, or sea cucumber, that is sensible to the contamination and the sea disturbance.

Flagship species is a species chosen to represent an environmental cause, such as an ecosystem in need of conservation. These species are chosen for their vulnerability, attractiveness or distinctiveness in order to engender support and acknowledgment from the public at large. Thus, the concept of a flagship species holds that by giving publicity to a few key species, the support given to those species will successfully leverage conservation of entire ecosystems and all species contained therein. Some examples of flagship species are the Asiatic lion and the Bengal tiger of India, the giant panda of China, the golden lion tamarin of Brazil, the African elephant, the mountain gorilla of central Africa, and the orangutan of southeast Asia.

And how can we determine the biodiversity of an ecosystem?

To determine the biodiversity entails a different approach for each degree of biological organization.

To ecosystems scale, the composition comes given by its biotic and abiotic parts, being its structure the component of the distribution pattern of the species, nutrients and hydric resources in the space and time; therefore, if an ecosystem is analyzed during a certain period of time, we will be able to determine its biodiversity, and as the function of the ecosystem can be described like the frequency with which disturbances take place or the description of their biogeochemical cycles, we can use physical-chemistries techniques of analysis of nutrients of the ground and of the rainwater that allows us to acquire a greater knowledge on its cycles.

If we support this study with aerial photographies and satellite images, we obtain more data on the diversity of the

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ecosystem.

The taxonomy and the census of the species that coexist

in an ecosystem also contribute valuable data to consider. To add that the environmental studies have to be always

made with the maximum respect towards the ecosystems and the species that cohabit in them, producing the smaller possible impact to the existing communities.

To conclude this lecture, I would like to quote Peter

Scott, founder chairman of the World Wildlife Federation, who said, “The conservationist's most important task, if we are to save the earth, is to educate.”

And now, let me ask you all a question:

Why do you think that it’s important to preserve biodiversity?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to all the presents that came to join this lecture,

and especially thanks to Second Physics and GalaxyFleet Commandy Groups for their invitation.

REFERENCES Dr. Montserrat Vilà Planella. BIODIVERSITY: something more

than a listing of species, Quercus 126, August 1996, Page 30-33.

Walter, B.H. (1991). Biodiversity and ecological redundancy. Conservation Biology, 6: 18-23.

Jane Goodall & Marc Bekoff. The Ten Trusts, Paidós Contextos, 2003.

Hitckman, Roberts and Larson. Integrated Principles of Zoology, McGraw Hill Interamericana.

Cunninghan and Cunningham. Principles of Environmental Science, McGraw Hill 2009.

Some links: http://www.cbd.int/2010/welcome/ http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2009/091103_Biodiversit

y.doc.htm http://data.gbif.org/welcome.htm http://www.e-biosphere09.org/

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