Origins of Biodiversity, written by Michael J Benton is the first article I found interesting. Benton first discusses how “it has been startlingly difficult to envisage the shape of increasing biodiversity through time for all sorts of reasons”. This lays out the foundation for the rest of the article. He explains how paleontology and geology both play into trying to figure out the baseline of the biodiversity on earth. Part of this is the debate on a curve that was created to sum up the biodiversity on earth. Benton explains that “there has been a long-running controversy among paleontologists about whether such a curve can be read at face value, or whether there are major geological and sampling biases that mean we massively underestimate global biodiversity backwards in time”. He also goes on to address the “rules of biodiversity” by elaborating on lineage, extinction laws and how they play into our knowledge with fossil records. Another part of this is the diversification of land and sea organisms. Benton explains that in one of his sources “John Wiens has demonstrated that predominantly terrestrial animal clads have more rapid rates of diversification then marine clads”. Lastly he concludes with “diversification modes through time”. This last section in Benton’s article explains how “evolutionary models may change during the lifetime of a major group”.

  For the last source of my research log I chose A Film about Carl Linnaeus by the National History Museum. I found this film on youtube and it summarizes Carolus Linnaeus’s life and work. The film begins with introducing who Carolus Linnaeus is by stating his birth and where hes from. It states he was “born in the souther swedish province of smarland in 1707 and is considered to be one of the most influential scientists of his time”. According to the film he was an “avid gardener and lutheran pastor”. He also studied medicine at “both the universities of lund and the university of uppsala” and “in 1732 he mounted a botanical expedition”. It elaborates by giving some detail into his expedition about how “he traveled some three thousand miles collecting biological specimens and taking notes”. That wasn’t the only expedition that Carolus Linnaeus went on either according to the film. He also went on a second one “in 1734”. Carolus Linnaeus was also an “empiricist” meaning that “he didn’t believe things he didn’t see with his own eyes. According to the film he “moved to the netherlands” “in 1735”, which was also the same year that his “most well-known work the systema natera or the system of nature” was published. Dr. Charlie Jarvis called Linnaeus’s work “revolutionary particularly in the plant kingdom”. In “1741” he was “awarded a professorship at uppsala university”. Another point that was made in the film was about how “he wrote not just about classification but also about ecology”. Ending the film, Linnaeus died in “1778” and is described as “driven by a lust for all nature and the desire to understand and classify it”. 

Biodiversity Connecting with the Tapestry of Life, written by A. Alonso, F. Dallmeier, E. Granek & P. Raven, takes a more simple and effective approach to explaining the effects of current biodiversity loss. Similar to the last article I read about the current state of biodiversity, this article beings with the extinction rate and how we are currently in what is considered the sixth mass extinction. The first reason that is addressed is the growing population of people on the planet. According to the article “over the past 50 years alone, world population grew from 2.5 billion to 6 billion people”(p. 14). This corresponds with the loss of biodiversity because as more people populate the earth there is a growing demand on natural resources. Another large factor is habitat loss. Logging, filling wetlands, plowing prairies, grazing livestock, mining, expanding building, damming rivers and trawling ocean beds are examples of how people directly affect the habitats of organisms and their ecosystems. According to the article “where habitats are not completely destroyed, they are fragmented”I (p. 16). These fragments make species more isolated which results in “loss of genetic diversity, and local extinction”(p. 16). Besides habitat loss, invasive species is also a large problem in biodiversity. Exotic species are introduced into new ecosystems and “wreak economic and environmental havoc”(p. 17). Resources are more often then not overused as well. This includes over-fishing, high logging rates and “The $10 billion-a-year global market in wildlife - for pets, folk medicines, gourmet foods, decorative objects and other uses”(p. 17). Pollution as well as global climate change are another two factors to the loss of biodiversity. According to the article, “As of May 2000, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service combined had listed 1,231 species” “as endangered or threatened in the United States”(p. 20).