Measuring biodiversity next year

Just a reminder to everyone that the CBD is soliciting comments on the proposed Post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Needless to say, Sean Hoban and colleagues have been thinking this through and are proposing genetic diversity targets and indicators, and for all species, not just crops and their wild relatives:

  • the number of populations with effective population size above versus below 500
  • the proportion of populations maintained within species,
  • the number of species and populations in which genetic diversity is monitored using DNA-based methods.

Better than genebank accession numbers, I guess, but are they “simple” enough to measure repeatedly and consistently?

Oh, and by the way, there’s also a proposal around to have a single, headline global extinction target.

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