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the u.n recently announced a goal to reduce earth's extinction rate by 90 by 2050 as a way to hopefully stave off our planet's sixth mass extinction but there are a few tiny problems we don't know exactly how many species exist how many are facing extinction and how many we could actually save the reason there's no standard way to measure biodiversity and we're missing a lot of data in recent years reports on extinction and biodiversity loss have pointed towards a global drop in species back in 2019 hundreds of researchers from a u.n backed international organization found that one million species of fauna and flora are at risk of extinction experts estimate that today's extinction rate is
between a thousand and ten thousand times higher than the background rate measuring biodiversity losses is incredibly complicated especially because there's no standard way to do it there isn't like a one-size-fits-all metric that we could use that we can always you know that will always be appropriate the most common way to track biodiversity is to measure species richness or count the number of species in a particular place and time another metric is species evenness which tracks the population levels of different species just to name a few it's a good idea to actually look at multiple metrics because these metrics of biodiversity are not fully independent and they also only capture certain facets of biodiversity depending
on what metric you use you could get completely different results when it comes to conservation efforts or biodiversity offsets like when developers measure biodiversity loss for a project how we measure biodiversity can really make a difference on top of that global averages don't always reflect biodiversity variation on a local scale it's important to look locally since biodiversity affects how ecosystems impact water supply fuel pollination food and more for their surrounding regions and what researchers are finding is pretty surprising turns out local biodiversity measures are incredibly mixed and some ecosystems are doing even better than we might expect instead of seeing biodiversity loss everywhere we
saw a bit of a balance of losses and gains but don't get too excited yet what we also see pretty much everywhere is a shuffling of species by shuffling we mean that some species are dying out or leaving ecosystems while others are entering them changing the composition we think that this shuffling of species is partly responsible for this connection of how biodiversity is changing at different scales researchers from the university of hawaii simulated local coral reefs over two years and found that species shuffled but did not collapse despite warmer temperatures and ocean acidification that's great news right well maybe what that means for the health of the reef is not entirely clear yet species shuffling can happen in a
number of ways one study found that over the past 29 years fish assemblages in the north atlantic were becoming more similar to each other aka homogenized over time southern species move north to warming waters caused by the climate crisis in some cases these new arrivals are generalist species which thanks to their ability to thrive in various environments can increase competition for resources for example cane toads are one of the world's most widespread invasive species in australia their introduction led to the rapid population decline of native endangered species like northern coals to get a clearer picture of what's going on we need data a lot of it most of the current research
is concentrated in europe and north america we're also sorely lacking information from the tropics where half of the earth's known species reside luckily there are several efforts working to fill in those gaps maria is part of biotime an open access database of studies in the same ecosystems over a number of years the database now has 12 million entries for about 50 000 species another notable project is europa bond which hopes to use sensors drones and citizen scientists to create a more complete picture of europe's species makeup in the coming years all this data could have a huge impact on policies and goals to conserve as much biodiversity as possible many studies show that we're still on track to lose almost half the world's known
species by 2100 so if we want to course correct we're going to need all the help we can get one of the coolest things about biodiversity research is that a lot of it is done by regular citizens surveying their local habitats and this is where we come in i would strongly encourage uh people to engage with this with these kinds of efforts because not only are they helping science you know they might be surprised by all the diversity that's at their doorstep if you want to learn more about conservation efforts going on or right now check out our series rewild so what else do you want to know about the sixth mass extinction let us know down in the comments don't forget to subscribe and i'll see you next time on seeker
