Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>On this week's show: the complex relationship between inequality and health and a roundup of stories from our daily news site</jats:p>

<jats:p>A weekly roundup of information on newly offered instrumentation, apparatus, and laboratory materials of potential interest to researchers</jats:p>

<jats:sec> <jats:title>Background</jats:title> <jats:p>A principal function of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to “perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity.” In December 2013, its second plenary session approved a program to begin a global assessment in 2015. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and five other biodiversity-related conventions have adopted IPBES as their science-policy interface, so these assessments will be important in evaluating progress toward the CBD’s Aichi Targets of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020. As a contribution toward such assessment, we review the biodiversity of eukaryote species and their extinction rates, distributions, and protection. We document what we know, how it likely differs from what we do not, and how these differences affect biodiversity statistics. Interestingly, several targets explicitly mention “known species”—a strong, if implicit, statement of incomplete knowledge. We start by asking how many species are known and how many remain undescribed. We then consider by how much human actions inflate extinction rates. Much depends on where species are, because different biomes contain different numbers of species of different susceptibilities. Biomes also suffer different levels of damage and have unequal levels of protection. How extinction rates will change depends on how and where threats expand and whether greater protection counters them.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Advances</jats:title> <jats:p>Recent studies have clarified where the most vulnerable species live, where and how humanity changes the planet, and how this drives extinctions. These data are increasingly accessible, bringing greater transparency to science and governance. Taxonomic catalogs of plants, terrestrial vertebrates, freshwater fish, and some marine taxa are sufficient to assess their status and the limitations of our knowledge. Most species are undescribed, however. The species we know best have large geographical ranges and are often common within them. Most known species have small ranges, however, and such species are typically newer discoveries. The numbers of known species with very small ranges are increasing quickly, even in well-known taxa. They are geographically concentrated and are disproportionately likely to be threatened or already extinct. We expect unknown species to share these characteristics. Current rates of extinction are about 1000 times the background rate of extinction. These are higher than previously estimated and likely still underestimated. Future rates will depend on many factors and are poised to increase. Finally, although there has been rapid progress in developing protected areas, such efforts are not ecologically representative, nor do they optimally protect biodiversity.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Outlook</jats:title> <jats:p> Progress on assessing biodiversity will emerge from continued expansion of the many recently created online databases, combining them with new global data sources on changing land and ocean use and with increasingly crowdsourced data on species’ distributions. Examples of practical conservation that follow from using combined data in Colombia and Brazil can be found at <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.savingspecies.org">www.savingspecies.org</jats:ext-link> and <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3zjeJW2NVk">www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3zjeJW2NVk</jats:ext-link> . </jats:p> </jats:sec>

<jats:p>In a world that is increasingly connected, that grows smaller every day, and where so many human actions are exposed to prying eyes, it seems almost incomprehensible that the world's largest twinjet aircraft, with 239 passengers and crew, could vanish for more than 2 months. Determining the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) has become a scientific detective story, emerging through a combination of scientific technologies used to address problems for which they were never designed. The search for MH370 illustrates a humanitarian dividend from past investments in science as searchers attempt to bring closure to the families and friends of the victims of the tragedy.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In science news around the world, German science gets a funding boost, a young Egyptian science fair contestant may seek asylum in the United States, and more.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Follow the links below for a roundup of the week's top stories in science, or <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/950.1.full.pdf">download a PDF of the entire section</jats:ext-link> . <jats:list list-type="bullet"> <jats:list-item> <jats:p> <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/950.2.summary">Random Samples</jats:ext-link> </jats:p> </jats:list-item> <jats:list-item> <jats:p> <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/950.3.summary">Around the World</jats:ext-link> </jats:p> </jats:list-item> <jats:list-item> <jats:p> <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/951.summary">Newsmakers</jats:ext-link> </jats:p> </jats:list-item> </jats:list> </jats:p>