{"id":141514,"date":"2012-09-24T12:58:38","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T11:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/?p=141514"},"modified":"2012-09-24T13:00:49","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T12:00:49","slug":"diversidad-los-inventarios-de-la-vida-y-otros-recursos-naturales-la-importancia-de-las-bases-de-datos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/2012\/09\/24\/141514","title":{"rendered":"Diversidad: Los Inventarios de la Vida y Otros Recursos Naturales (La Importancia de las Bases de Datos)"},"content":{"rendered":"

No existe mayor dispendio de dinero<\/strong>,<\/span> <\/span>en lo que concierne a los inventarios de la vida, o de cualquier recurso natural, que hacer proyecciones en base a asunciones de lo que actualmente \u201ccreemos\u201d que existe<\/strong><\/span>. Ya lo hemos repetido en este blog por activa y pasiva. Ning\u00fan modelo puede ofrecer\u00a0escenarios\u00a0aceptables\u00a0partiendo de malos datos<\/strong><\/span>. Y es que los inventarios actuales son paup\u00e9rrimos<\/strong><\/span>, se mire por donde se mire. El caso que os vamos a mostrar hoy es palmario. Se pensaba que hab\u00edan sido descubiertas y catalogadas 1.000.000 de especies de plantas vasculares. Estudios actuales han rebajado tal cifra hasta 400.000<\/strong><\/span>. \u00a1Que b\u00e1rbaro! Como podr\u00e9is observar m\u00e1s abajo, existen plantas hasta con m\u00e1s de seiscientas sinonimias. No todos los tax\u00f3nomos atesoran la misma pericia o destreza a la hora de clasificar las especies, o tipos de suelos, rocas sedimentos, etc. Tales carencias devienen aun m\u00e1s agudas cuando se tiene en cuenta que muchos taxa<\/strong> <\/span>(con independencia del recurso natural implicado) fueron descritos hace decenios, cuando no siglos, por escuelas diferentes y expertos que hablaban\u00a0idiomas distintos, en una sociedad repleta de fronteras y barricadas para la libre diseminaci\u00f3n de la informaci\u00f3n<\/strong><\/span> que atesoraban. Parte de estos problemas pueden ser hoy resueltos haciendo uso de bases de datos p\u00fablicas<\/strong><\/span> con buenas descripciones y fotograf\u00edas, incluso apelando a los an\u00e1lisis digitales de im\u00e1genes. Estas nuevas herramientas e Internet<\/strong> <\/span>nos ayudar\u00e1n a erradicar tal marasmo en el futuro. Ahora bien, aun restan otros muchos por solventar, ya que la inherente ambig\u00fcedad del concepto de especie resulta ser insoslayable. Por ejemplo<\/span><\/strong>, la noticia nos informa de abundantes sinonimias en los robles. Sin embargo, se soslaya que en el g\u00e9nero Quercus <\/em>(robles, encinas, etc.) la hibridaci\u00f3n es la norma, lo cual hizo defender a ciertos expertos en este grupo que deb\u00eda proponerse taxonom\u00edas en la que las especies no fueran los inevitables puntos finales de sus respectivas jerarqu\u00edas clasificatorias. Nos referimos a\u00a0<\/span>la paradoja de Gregg<\/span><\/span><\/a>. Tengamos presentes que hablamos de las plantas vasculares. \u00bfQu\u00e9 puede ocurrir en otros taxa mucho menos analizados y en los que actualmente tan solo existen un pu\u00f1ado escaso de tax\u00f3nomos con pericia?. \u00bfOs imagin\u00e1is?. Y toda esta desiderata sin apelar a la ingente cantidad de especies que permanece por catalogar, describir y clasificar, las diferencias de criterio entre diferentes escuelas taxon\u00f3micas., etc., etc.,<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Y mientras tanto Nature como Science<\/strong> <\/span>y otras revistas publicando art\u00edculos en los que ciertos \u201cexpertos\u201d \u00bf? Proyectan el n\u00famero total de especies en base a premisas que no se sostienen<\/strong><\/span>. Me ense\u00f1aron que, en ciencia, como en casi todos los aspectos de la vida, los edificios comienzan a construirse partiendo de unos buenos cimientos<\/span><\/strong>. Resulta palmario que la indagaci\u00f3n cient\u00edfica contempor\u00e1nea ha perdido la racionalidad que se le presupone<\/strong><\/span>. Todo vale con tal de publicar, aunque sean falacias cuando no \u201cpurititas\u201d majader\u00edas. Empero dar dinero con vistas a llevar acabo buenos trabajos de campo parece ser considerada una pr\u00e1ctica proscrita. Uno comienza a preguntarse en este mundo, \u00bfQui\u00e9n recuerda lo c\u00e1nones de la buena ciencia?.<\/strong> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Juan Jos\u00e9 Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"mapa-mundial-puntos-calientes-plantas-vascualaresnature-education\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Mapa Mundial de Puntos Calientes sobre Biodiversidad de Plantas Vasculares. Fuente: Scitable. Nature Education<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

El n\u00famero de plantas conocidas pasa de un mill\u00f3n a s\u00f3lo 400.000<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a> <\/strong><\/h3>\n

El Diccionario de la Vida ha sufrido un inesperado y profundo recorte. M\u00e1s de 600.000 plantas han sido eliminadas del cat\u00e1logo tras una exhaustiva revisi\u00f3n cient\u00edfica. Es decir, el diccionario ha perdido m\u00e1s de la mitad de sus registros, seg\u00fan informa el diario brit\u00e1nico The Guardian.<\/span><\/a><\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

FUENTE | <\/span>El Mundo Digital<\/span><\/a> 21\/09\/2010 <\/span><\/p>\n

A finales de a\u00f1o, el equipo de investigadores brit\u00e1nicos y estadounidenses que ha llevado a cabo esta revisi\u00f3n anunciar\u00e1 que el n\u00famero real de especies conocidas en el mundo asciende a aproximadamente 400.000.<\/p>\n

Durante siglos, los bot\u00e1nicos han ido recopilando y catalogando \u00abnuevas plantas\u00bb sin percatarse de que en realidad esas especies ya hab\u00edan sido descubiertas. Incluso algunas de ellas han sido catalogadas una y otra vez. El tomate, por ejemplo, tiene 790 nombres diferentes mientras que el roble ha sido descrito de 600 formas distintas.<\/p>\n

Los cient\u00edficos ya sab\u00edan que algunas especies estaban duplicadas aunque no imaginaban que hubiese tantas repetidas.<\/p>\n

UN PROYECTO DE TRES A\u00d1OS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Durante la Convenci\u00f3n de Diversidad Biol\u00f3gica<\/span><\/a> celebrada en 2002, los 193 pa\u00edses que asistieron manifestaron su preocupaci\u00f3n debido a que sin una revisi\u00f3n adecuada del n\u00famero de especies existentes resultaba imposible determinar cu\u00e1ntas estaban amenazadas as\u00ed como valorar si los esfuerzos de los conservacionistas estaban dando sus frutos. El proyecto de revisi\u00f3n ha durado tres a\u00f1os.<\/p>\n

La informaci\u00f3n revisada es de gran importancia para las organizaciones o investigadores que buscan plantas importantes desde un punto de vista econ\u00f3mico, como aquellas que pueden ser utilizadas para desarrollar nuevos f\u00e1rmacos o alimentos.<\/p>\n

Asimismo, el hecho de que una planta pueda tener dos o tres nombres impide a los investigadores que buscan informaci\u00f3n sobre una especie en concreto obtener toda la informaci\u00f3n disponible puesto que s\u00f3lo buscar\u00e1 un nombre.<\/p>\n

Noticias relacionadas<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

El proyecto \u00abEd\u00e9n del sur\u00bb<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Hay seis veces menos especies en la Tierra de lo que se cre\u00eda<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Scientists prune list of world’s plants<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n

A project helping conservation work has deleted more than 600,000 species of flowering plants that were duplicated or not ‘new’<\/span><\/p>\n

Join the Guardian’s Biodiversity 100 campaign<\/span><\/a>, Juliette Jowit<\/span><\/a>; <\/span>guardian.co.uk<\/span><\/a>, Sunday 19 September 2010 16.42 BST; <\/span>Article history<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

More than 600,000 plant species have been deleted from the dictionary of life after the most comprehensive assessment carried out by scientists.<\/p>\n

For centuries, botanists from different parts of the world have been collecting and naming \u00abnew\u00bb plants<\/span><\/a> without realising that many were in fact the same. The humble tomato boasts 790 different names, for example, while there are 600 different monikers for the oak tree and its varieties.<\/p>\n

The result was a list of more than 1 million flowering plant species. Although experts have long known that it included many duplicates, no one was sure how many. Later this year, the study team, led by UK and US scientists, will announce that the real number of flowering plant species around the world is closer to 400,000.<\/p>\n

The project – which has taken nearly three years – was the number one request made by the 193 government members of the Convention on Biological Diversity<\/span><\/a> at their meeting in 2002. There were concerns that without this work, it would be impossible to work out how many plants were under threat and how successful conservationists were in saving them. The information will also be vital for any organisation or researcher looking at \u00abeconomically important\u00bb plants, such as those for food and nutrition or medicine, said Alan Paton, assistant keeper of the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew<\/span><\/a>, west London, one of the four leading partners in the project.<\/p>\n

\u00abOn average, one plant might have between two and three names, which doesn’t sound a great deal, but if you’re trying to find information on a plant, you might not find all [of it] because you’re only looking at one name,\u00bb Paton said. \u00abThat’s even more critical for economically useful plants: because they are more used, they tend to have more names.\u00bb In one example, researchers calculated that for the six most-used species of Plectranthus<\/em>, a relative of the basil plant, a researcher would miss 80% of information available if they looked under only the most commonly used name. On another database, they found only 150 of 500 nutritionally important plant species using the names cited in current literature. \u00abBy going for one name, we missed the majority of information mankind knows about that plant, which isn’t too clever,\u00bb said Paton. \u00abWhat’s really a breakthrough is we have a place which allows people to search through all the names used.\u00bb<\/p>\n

Kew Gardens joined up nearly three years ago with Missouri Botanical Garden<\/span><\/a> in the US, and experts on two of the biggest and most valuable plant families: legumes, or peas and beans, and Compositae<\/em>, which include <\/em>asters, daisies and sunflowers.<\/p>\n

They have since attempted to search existing plant lists and work out an \u00abaccepted\u00bb name for each species, and then list all known variations. One of the databases was originally set up using \u00a3250 left in the will of Charles Darwin. The full results will not be published until the end of the year, but so far the researchers have found 301,000 accepted species, 480,000 alternative names, and have 240,000 left to assess. Although work will continue to assess smaller plant groups in more detail and check for missed duplications, Paton said they now believe that the true number of plant species will turn out to be \u00ab400,000 or just over\u00bb. \u00abYou can’t give an absolute number of names, but we have narrowed the possibility,\u00bb he said. Previous estimates, without the help of a full assessment, put the figure at between 250,000-400,000. Most of the work of the study group was sifting and sorting different names allocated to one species, often because scientists were simply not aware of the work of rivals and colleagues who had previously \u00abdescribed\u00bb the plant in a scientific journal, or because of confusion caused by superficial differences such as different sized leaves in different climates. In some cases, plants thought to be the same have also been judged to be different species because of differences which have been revealed by later scientific discoveries, such as DNA.<\/p>\n

As well as the likely 400,000-odd flowering plants, there are thought to be 15,000 species of ferns and their allies, 1,000 gymnosperms such as conifers, and 23,000 mosses and allies making up the plant kingdom. For comparison there are more than 1 million species of insects listed by science, 28,000 living species of fish, 10,000 birds and 5,400 mammals. A meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in October in Japan<\/span><\/a> is likely to declare that targets to halt biodiversity loss by this year failed and set tougher new aims to halt the problem.<\/p>\n

This article was amended on 20 September 2010. The original said that poplars are gymnosperms. This has been corrected<\/em><\/p>\n

New Scientist<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Half the world’s plant names weeded out <\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n

12:09 22 September 2010 by <\/span>Andy Coghlan<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Botanists tidying up the global list of flower species have weeded out almost half of the current names because they turned out to be the same species by different monikers. So a list originally estimated to hold a million <\/span>flowering species<\/span><\/a> is now being whittled down to a final count predicted to come in at about 400,000 once the project is complete.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00abTake the lemon-scented basil plant,\u00bb says <\/span>Alan Paton<\/span><\/a> of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, and a leader in the three-year \u00abname-pruning\u00bb project. \u00abIt’s been given five different Latin names as different people discovered and named it, but now we’ve settled on calling it Ocimum africanum Lour<\/em>.\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n

In all, the new list of species with agreed single names stands at 301,000, with 480,000 former synonyms now discarded. A further 230,000 are still being evaluated through the project, in which Kew is collaborating with the <\/span>Missouri Botanical Garden<\/span><\/a> in St Louis and other plant repositories. \u00abWe’re hoping to get a centralised list up and running by the end of the year,\u00bb says Paton.<\/span><\/p>\n

The name-pruning exercise enables botanists to tap into all available information on each species. Till now, as much as 80 per cent of the scientific information on individual species may have been hidden because it was archived under multiple Latin names that botanists thought were different species. Having a reliable inventory of the world’s species is also vital in the run-up to the United Nations’ <\/span>summit on the global Convention on Biological Diversity<\/span><\/a> in Nagoya, Japan, next month.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paton, Alan<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n

Job Title: <\/strong>Assistant Herbarium Keeper, Biodiversity Information and Conventions; Department: <\/strong>Herbarium;Section: <\/strong>Biodiversity Information and Conventions.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No existe mayor dispendio de dinero, en lo que concierne a los inventarios de la vida, o de cualquier recurso natural, que hacer proyecciones en base a asunciones de lo que actualmente \u201ccreemos\u201d que existe. Ya lo hemos repetido en este blog por activa y pasiva. Ning\u00fan modelo puede ofrecer\u00a0escenarios\u00a0aceptables\u00a0partiendo de malos datos. Y es que los inventarios actuales son paup\u00e9rrimos, se mire por donde se mire. El caso que os vamos a mostrar hoy es palmario. Se pensaba que hab\u00edan sido descubiertas y catalogadas 1.000.000 de especies de plantas vasculares. Estudios actuales han rebajado tal cifra hasta 400.000. \u00a1Que\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":4}},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141514"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142852,"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141514\/revisions\/142852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madrimasd.org\/blogs\/universo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}