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Institution:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Botanical Garden
Email Address: pswhite@unc.edu
Research Area: Ecology
Views of Peter S. White about report of the Biodiversity Monitoring Workshop :
I was excited to read the workshop to report and fully endorse the need for a network of biodiversity observatories. There are perhaps several areas in which this program would provide unique opportunities: (1) linking systematic inventory with an ecological conceptual model (e.g., systematics inventories overlapping in space and organized around the ecological address of species as well as typical collection label data); (2) providing for repeatable inventories (by paying close attention to spatial and temporal scale of observation as a factor in the number of species observed) whereas most checklists cannot be repeated and have not objective measure of their completeness); (3) providing a stimulus to the systematics community and the training of systematics students.
I am Mike Palmer of Oklahoma State University are keenly interested in issues of scale and species richness. Our paper in American Naturalist explores some of the issues (Amer. Nat. 144:717-740, 1994), but a simple version is that the number of species found is always contingent on the observation window: the grain and extent of the observations in either space and time. This provides us a handle on making checklists repeatable.
I look forward to enthusiastically supporting this. I note also that the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory project in the Smokies (now 9 months old) is in the process of examining some of the same issues and should be a partner in pursuing this project. There is some chance of USDI-NPS support, but also public support in the park area. That project, by the way, seeks a role for parataxonomists (lay people an school children trained to collect and sort samples).