Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Society for Conservation Biology is pleased to announce a new Policy Fellowship. Deadline for applying is May 31st. Description and applications procedure are available at: http://www.conbio.org/jobs/jordanfellow.cfm

A new review in the journal Nature examines the evidence that high biodiversity helps reduce the transmission of infectious diseases. These include both human diseases such as Lyme disease that are transmitted via wildlife, as well as diseases of native plant and wildlife species. Although many questions remain about the generality of relationships between biodiversity and disease, it appears that ‘weedy’ species that persist even as biodiversity is lost are typically more competent vectors of disease than other species. Thus biodiversity loss may increase the relative abundance of species that can amplify disease transmission. An analogous effect may be seen in the human ‘microbiome’, where overuse of antibiotics can allow an increase to harmful levels of organisms that are normally kept at low densities by a diverse microbial community within the human body. The authors conclude that “despite remaining questions, connections between biodiversity and disease are now sufficiently clear to increase the urgency of local, regional, and global efforts to preserve natural ecosystems and the biodiversity they contain.”
The full paper is here.

We’re showcasing a guest blog in the right sidebar of the page, a new blog ( www.conbiopolicy.org ) that presents the latest news on the policy activities of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB). The purpose of this blog is to make SCB members and the wider public aware of the variety of policy work being done by SCB’s global organization, regional sections, working groups, and chapters, and to facilitate dialogue between SCB members on how to make the society’s activities more effective at advancing our mission of conserving biological diversity.