1 Reply by stevemcbill (edited by stevemcbill 23-06-2010 09:47:21)

  • stevemcbill
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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

Charles,

Can I ask when, if at all, the NBN is going to look at adding bacteria into the Dictionaries and to allow recording of this huge area of biodiversity ??

There is far greater genetic variation in the lower life forms than in the macroforms and saving species of tree in a Rainforest is laudable but useless if we do not also save the habitat - most of which is controlled (?) by the bacteria and bacterial associations within the habitat.

Surely we must begin to look at soil and water bacteria before too long ??  Perhaps, for the nonce, we can 'leave' the recording of disease pathogens to the health service though I can see no efforts being made to plot distributions for such species.

These species areas may not be the 'normal' work of amateur naturalists but there must be work ongoing out there in Universities and Company Research Departments which if collated into the NBN would help in 'completing the picture' of species distribution and, more importantly, species interaction and reliance.

Comments and thoughts (positive and negative) from yourself and others are warmly welcomed.

Cheers

Steve

Steve J. McWilliam
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2 Reply by CharlesHussey

  • CharlesHussey
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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

Steve,

Your point is well made.

Traditionally, the Species Dictionary is populated with checklists of species occuring in the UK. I could probably find a complete checklist of names of bacteria (which would be a large list!) but I am not aware of good list for UK species - if I was it would probably be in there already. We do actually have 1021 bacterial names in the Dictionary (although most of these are cyanobacteria from the coded checklist of freshwater algae) spread across several lists.

Best wiahes,

Charles Hussey

NBN Species Dictionary Project Manager (Retired!) smile

3 Reply by burkmarr

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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

I struggle to see the practical application in terms of conserving biodiversity. What does one do to conserve bacteria? Don't we conserve that kind of biodiversity by attempting to protect higher-order biodiversity and the ecosystems that they are part of? I worry that it's a bit of a distraction when there's so much else to be doing.

Richard Burkmar
Biodiversity Project Officer
Field Studies Council

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4 Reply by trichoptera

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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

I feel this would be a waste of resources at this time.  The likelihood of getting check-lists of obscure groups is low and then having to do the synonymy so that differently dated publications can be correlated is a nightmare.

Yet it would be desirable for a record centre to know that there had been say a survey of soil bacteria at a site in their area and direct an enquirer to that.  Perhaps that already takes place. 

There is also currently a lot of  recording of obscure 'organisms' by amateurs e.g. squirrel pox, and bacterial plant galls and garden plant diseases. 

My solution iwould be to encourage recording of anything and certainly to encourage the deposition of a record of any biological or geological 'object' with record centres but if necessary just accept the names as given and divorce them from the Recorder species dictionary strait jacket for record acceptance.  In  the futue there will be the check lists and the synonymy so at least the data has been captured and it may be useful and if not well better then wringing hands wishing it had been collated.

Ian Wallace

5 Reply by charliebarnes

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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

burkmarr wrote:

conserving biodiversity. What does one do to conserve bacteria?

But surely the role of the NBN/Recorder/LRCs is not to conserve - just to provide the data?

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

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6 Reply by stevemcbill

  • stevemcbill
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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

Must admit that I would very much agree with Charlie on this one.

Any further thoughts on the matter Chris  - have opinions changed over the last few years ??

Steve

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7 Reply by ChrisR

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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

Well, we have always maintained the UKSI as a resource to aid the recording of biological information. Where we see a request for a name or taxon to be added the basic principle remains that there should be a need for it to be there. So, although the UKSI is a catalogue of Britain's biodiversity, we have never seriously attempted to make it "complete" by adding all of the microorganisms that currently aren't recorded - like many bacteria and viruses. We do have quite a lot of bacteria in the system - along with other single-celled organisms - but only usually where there has been a requirement to have them from within the NBN family :)

Another potential problem might be sourcing a checklist - is there one? I once asked a virologist if he would find having a list of viruses in the UKSI useful and he thought it was pretty pointless because distributional data is not collected or used in the same way that it is with other wildlife. You also quickly get mired in taxonomic problems like having to allow for strains and taxa that suddenly morph into something slightly different.

Chris Raper, Manager of the UK Species Inventory, Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity,
Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD.  (tel: 020 7942 5894)
also Tachinid Recording Scheme (http://tachinidae.org.uk/)

8 Reply by stevemcbill

  • stevemcbill
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Re: Missed Biodiversity - The 'Small' Stuff

Cheers Chris.

Steve

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