South Africa—Serious about Biodiversity Science 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Feature South Africa—Serious about Biodiversity Science Michael Cherry I n 1772, Carolus Linnaeus wrote a letter, now oft-quoted, to Ryk Tulbagh, the Governor of the Cape—in which he envied Tulbagh’s “sovereign control of that Paradise on now exceeds the $16 million it receives from its parliamentary grant and from entrance fees paid by the million or so visitors to its gardens each year. Huntley is optimistic that this brief can succeed, although he concedes that in few countries does any single institution bear responsibility for research, information dissemination, and applications relating to biodiversity. But he believes that South Africa is a small enough country, with enough good intellectual capacity, for this model to work. This view is echoed by Andrew Balmford of Cambridge University, who is spending a sabbatical at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute for African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town. “While the obvious challenge is to link biodiversity conservation to development needs”, he says, “there are very few developing countries which have the prospect of delivering jobs related to the conservation industry. South Africa has this prospect, not only because it is unbelievably diverse, but because of international goodwill towards the country”. Huntley’s strategy will be to bring a sound scienti?c base to the enterprise, as he has already done with the NBI. There are several examples of this. One is the African Plants Initiative—being led by the SANBI, Kew Gardens in the United Kingdom (London), and the United States Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Missouri, United States)—whose aim is to create an electronic library of the type specimens of all African plants: an estimated 300 000 accessions of 60 000 species. This includes scanned pictures of each individual specimen, the quality of which, according to Huntley, “is as good as if one were examining the specimen through a standard dissecting microscop