Biodiversity: a treasure under threat Confronted with extreme environments, Nature can come up with astonishing innovations. But faced with changes as drastic as global warming, many species are becoming far more vulnerable Biodiversity’s jewels in danger ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A quarter of the most biodiverse regions on the planet will be affected by critical climatic conditions as early as 2030, should the Earth’s average temperature rise by more than 2°C. This is the case for humid tropical areas such as the Congo and Amazon rain forests, which are home to 50% of the planet’s biodiversity, or for certain regions typified by the rarity or diversity of their species, like taigas, Mediterranean-type garrigue, and boreal forests. To reach this conclusion, an international team of six researchers compared the latest global warming scenarios from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with maps of the most outstandingly biodiverse regions. This considerable statistical undertaking made it possible to draw up a list of the ecoregions that are most vulnerable to climate change and it should help to consolidate conservation projects in these areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature February 2011 Predicting plant adaptation to climate change Western Emerald. Faced with global warming, one of the challenges for evolutionary biology is to identify the genetic basis of the Tara Oceans expedition: piercing adaptation of species to climatic conditions, in order to predict their evolutionary pathways. A French-US study the secrets of plankton has shown that in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, genetic variation is directly linked to certain climate parameters After setting sail in September 2009 to study plankton in oceans such as temperature, humidity and aridity. The objective is to across the world, the Tara Oceans mission returned in March 2012 extend this study to cultivated species in order to select the with a collection of 40,000 samples. The consortium behind the varieties that are best adapted to future climate in specific expedition has published the analysis protocol of the samples and data regions. collected. The researchers hope to use the latest genome sequencing and microscopy image recognition methods, together with knowledge Science October 2011 of ocean parameters—temperature, salinity, etc—to describe the functioning of these ecosystems, which govern the whole oceanic food chain. PLoS Biology October 2011 18 A year at CNRS 2011
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