Friday, February 22, 2008

What is a specie?

Today and tomorrow students will take notes on what it takes to classify something as a specie. Why are species important other than for the sake of classification and keeping track of evolution? Defining a specie and conservation are inextricably linked.

An article in Nature, by Rob DeSalle & George Amato details the importance of conservations genetics and speciation.

The 'crisis discipline' of conservation biology has voraciously incorporated many technologies to speed up and increase the accuracy of conservation decision-making. Genetic approaches to characterizing endangered species or areas that contain endangered species are prime examples of this. Technical advances in areas such as high-throughput sequencing, microsatellite analysis and non-invasive DNA sampling have led to a much-expanded role for genetics in conservation. Such expansion will allow for more precise conservation decisions to be made and, more importantly, will allow conservation genetics to contribute to area- and landscape-based decision-making processes Click here to read more.

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