At present, Earth is experiencing the largest extinction to date, triggered by the increase of human activity in recent decades, which has been made inexorable succeeding population growth, making demands for food and fuel greater than ever. This has led to habitat loss, climate change, overexploitation, pollution and invasive alien species. Biodiversity loss is responsible for destabilizing ecosystems because it weakens their natural cycles, reducing the ecosystem’s productivity.
It has impacted both agricultural and pharmaceuticals industries due to their heavy dependence on the environment, resulting in a loss of profit and more importantly, an increased scarcity of food and medicine. Biodiversity loss is occurring at up to 1,000 times the natural rate and it is vital that this is stopped; otherwise the environment will be unable to support humankind in the future. A journal article read was Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human Well-Being where Diaz et al. (2006) outline the significance of biodiversity in sustaining human populations, justifying reasons for its preservation.
It was published on PLoS Biology, a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal, meaning the content was diffused to a wider audience at a faster rate, because it can be accessed with free of charge by scientists and researchers, who later expand on the conclusions drawn. However, the quality of the articles are often questionable, as many open-access journals’ income derives from the number of published articles, hence more articles may be published to acquire higher profits.
Yet, upon researching the authors’ names, it is evident that they are professors or scientists working in the ecology field, proving that they are experts. Another journal article read, Modelling Human Factors That Affect The Loss of Biodiversity, by Forester and Machlist (1996) examines the link between human activity and the increased rate of biodiversity loss. Published in Biological Conservation, a paid-access publication, it has been scrutinized by several people in the field who have separately confirmed whether the paper is of a high calibre worthy of publication.
Nonetheless, the article was published more than a decade ago, which means some of the information and the sources referred to could be out-dated, particularly acknowledging how there can be as much as a year between submission and final publication date. The final journal article, Biodiversity impacts ecosystem productivity as much as resources, disturbance, or herbivory, by Tilman et al. , (2012), illustrates the importance of biodiversity on the performance of an ecosystem. The article was recently published, thus contains up-to-date and relevant information.
However, the time between the submission and publication date for this article is relatively short – less than two months – thus provoking suspicion on whether the article was assessed based on the reputation of the contributing authors rather than its factual quality. The first book evaluated, Biodiversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues was published in 1995, the second, The Root Causes of Biodiversity Loss, was published in 2000, and the third, The Economics and Ecology of Biodiversity Decline, was published in 1998.
Book research’s advantages include the reliability of the information, because they are highly specific and written by field experts, typically university professors or NGO employees, and in the books read, with insight from ecologists and economists. On the contrary, their vast costs make them inaccessible to many researchers, especially students, and they are costly to environment, which is ironic in relation to the topic. However, many have been converted to E-books, which has enabled a growth in readers.
It can be time-consuming and laborious obtaining the relevant information and due to the length of time involved in writing a book, information can become out-dated. The newspaper article read, Biodiversity loss seen as greater financial risk than terrorism, says UN published by The Guardian on 27 October 2010. It is up-to-date information because newspaper articles are published on a daily basis. In addition, they are written in a manner to appeal to a broad audience, thus simple, unambiguous language is used. Nonetheless, they can be subject to bias and have hidden political agendas; the Guardian is politically aligned centre-left.
However, the article’s reliability is supported throughout by the facts and figures and quotes from officials from the World Bank and the UN. Meanwhile, the tabloid article read, England’s lost world: 421 species – including mammals, birds and plants – have become extinct over the past 200 years was published in The Daily Mail on 26 February 2014. The article’s straightforward language utilised and the short syntax facilitates its communication. However, photographs dominate the article, resulting in a lack of content. The information is also sensationalised in order to attract a larger audience.
The Daily Mail, specifically, has been subject to a number of lawsuits for reporting false information hence considerably undermining its reliability. WWF’s Living Planet Report 2014, is a recent publication published every two years, yet is very lengthy therefore can take time to find the required information. It is useful because it is primarily devoted to the topic of biodiversity loss on a global perspective and covers all ecosystems. FAO’s report, The Major Threats to Biodiversity and the Role of People provides a brief, clear summary of the underlying causes of the loss of biodiversity.
These two reports serve to inform in a comprehensible manner with their colourful photographs and user-friendly graphs. Meanwhile, UNEP’s report Impact of a Changing Environment on the Corporate Sector has a concise section on the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss, with the remaining sections devoted to other matters. NGOs have a long history of educating citizens on biodiversity loss, and use reports to discuss their undergoing work in tackling the issue in addition to raising awareness of it.
Field experts are sent to explore certain areas to examine the issue, making the information current. It is vital to recognise that NGOs can have hidden political motives, be prone to corruption and bribery, with reports being moulded and enhanced to signify that the NGO is making progress towards the issue despite the fact this may not be the case. Wikipedia can be notorious; nevertheless it has a wide coverage of topics and is easily navigable, with sections clearly divided with a ‘Contents’ table located at the top of the page.
On the Biodiversity Wikipedia, the desired information was easily accessed under ‘Threats’ that was further divided into sub-categories. Anyone is able to edit the articles, a clear disadvantage, yet the advantage is that one can view the changes made and view who made each change in addition to the information being highly up-to-date. Moreover, the two YouTube videos watched helped outline YouTube’s pros and cons. One of the videos was uploaded to a channel named Biointeractive, with many videos and subscribers, while an anonymous user uploaded the other.
Anyone is allowed to upload a video and this can provide raw and unfiltered information, which can be beneficial as harsher truths can be exposed but there lies the danger of false information being presented to provide a ‘shock-factor’. The videos were merely factual yet these facts could have been exaggerated. The blog post examined, Businesses could benefit from protecting biodiversity, self-published in 2010, relies on the author’s opinion and is not validated hence the quality cannot be guaranteed.
