Increasing the number of species has implications for preserving biodiversity and other conservation efforts.
"We have decided societally that the target for conservation is the species," said Robert Zink, a co-author of the study and a biologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "So it follows then that we really need to be clear about what a species is, how many there are, and where they’re found."
Hummingbird Ornament in American Museum of Natural History Shop
John Klicka, from the University of Washington, Seattle, also was a co-author on this study . This work was funded, in part, by the US National Science Foundation, grant #s 1241066 and 1146423. PLOS ONE paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166307
How Many Kinds of Birds Are There and Why Does It Matter?
Introduction
There can scarcely be a datum more critical for biologists to know, or of more intrinsic interest to the public, than the number of species of organisms that surround us [1]. As many authors have noted, identifying the elements of biodiversity is a prerequisite to their conservation. Beginning with early natural historians, an understanding of species diversity was organized and conceptualized. This understanding, codified into the Linnaean taxonomic scheme, formed the basis for scientific studies of speciation, phylogeny, and biogeography, and later came to play a role in species conservation. Over the last two and a half centuries since publication of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, estimates of the number of species have evolved because of changing philosophies regarding species concepts and, more recently, due to new molecular techniques that better allow discovery of discrete evolutionary units at relatively fine geographic scales [2]. Nevertheless, how much taxonomic diversity is present on Earth remains as one of the most vexing and important of scientific questions [3,4].
A profound confounding factor in estimating species diversity was noted by Mora et al. [5]: "In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description." However, this is thought to be less true of higher vertebrates and, for example, birds present a group that is considered to be taxonomically well known, with estimates that more than 95% of their global species diversity has been described.
But is this correct? We contend that actual avian evolutionary diversity is less well known than traditionally thought and is, indeed, substantially underestimated. Here, we evaluate differing concepts of species and the relatively recent application of molecular methods in establishing the diversity of the world’s birds. We compare molecular and morphological estimates of species numbers based on two concepts with differing conceptual bases, the biological species concept, which emphasizes the process and consequences of mate choice, and the diagnostic phylogenetic species concept, which focuses on the pattern of character differences to individuate taxa with separate evolutionary histories. We suggest that the latter (i.e. a taxonomy that documents evolutionary history and divergence accurately) best meets the requirements of studies of comparative biology, including studies of speciation and biogeography (enumerating patterns of diversity and endemism), as well as for the ecological and conservation sciences.
Read the entire paper: PLOS ONE paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166307
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