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Institution:Univ. of Colorado and US Forest Service
Email Address: mwalker@taimyr.colorado.edu
Research Area: Ecology
Views of Marilyn Walker about report of the Biodiversity Monitoring Workshop :
Bravo! This is an excellent, ambitious proposal. Reaching a deep understanding of controls on biodiversity is one of the most fundamental and important challenges facing the fields of ecology/biology, and this proposal provides a potential framework for doing this. I appreciate this opportunity to participate in this process.
My specific comments:
The minimum requirements for the observatories are extremely ambitious, and it is worth asking if we have the person power now to actually effectively run 50 observatories at that level. I wonder if a combination of major and minor observatories would not be more effective? Smaller observatories would have still have minimum standards, but they could be reduced. A goal could then be to provide the training necessary for these smaller sites to ramp up to full speed over a specified period of time.
Where do existing data on biodiversity fit in? It is critical that existing efforts related to the overall goals be integrated into the program. This might be most appropriately done through the proposed center. For example, the ESA Vegetation Classification Panel, an SBI project active since 1995, is currently working to implement an informatics project that would allow a stable, permanent archiving and analysis system for vegetation data. The work is being coordinated with national level systematics information efforts. It is critical that any new efforts in biodiversity are closely integrated to these types of existing efforts. While I certainly (strongly) support the effort to begin studies in the right way, and not to be burdened with loads of data that are not of current standard quality, I also think that we aren't going to get too far in understanding temporal dynamics of many systems without using historical data.