SCIENCE NEWS - 2010 is the deadline set for reversing declines in biodiversity.

This is a poignant year for anyone who cares about the rich diversity of life on planet Earth. 2010 was supposed to be a milestone. The 193 nations participating in a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity had agreed to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.”

Fat chance. The official document assessing the 2010 global outlook for biodiversity won’t be released until May, but conservationists and trend watchers predict at best a few bright points among worsening losses. Even a preview statement from the treaty secretariat says that, as of late January, “all the indications are that the 2010 target has not been met.”

Policy has achieved little for bio-diversity, but scientists have fared better in coming to understand just what biodiversity means for the fundamental workings of an ecosystem. From grasslands to oceans, ecologists are finding that greater diversity tends to boost an ecosystem’s productivity and reinforce its stability.

Biologists around the world are thus bootstrapping themselves out of despair and seizing the occasion to explain biodiversity and why it matters.

Entomologist Scott Miller is hosting a small event to mark the beginning of 2010, which the United Nations has declared the International Year of Biodiversity. Miller’s mini–New Year’s event may be low on champagne, but it’s a world-class demonstration of what biodiversity is. He’s using insects to convey the variety of life by giving a little tour of his workplace, which happens to be the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Miller starts with a few shallow wooden drawers topped with glass. The collection’s 135,000 drawers hold specimens from just about every kind of place an insect has ever been: tiny leaf miners that excavate within a single mangrove leaf and harvester ants that scurry over desert sands, for example.

All these insect habitats — the whole range of ecosystems on the planet — rank as a form of biodiversity, Miller says. He lifts trays holding insects grown from larvae picked out of fruits in Papua New Guinea. The assembled rows appear to contain duplicates of a tiny brown-winged thingy, but his trained eye recognizes dozens of species.

Another tray holds dozens of postage-stamp–sized brown moths pinned in evenly spaced rows. The moths also look the same at first glance, and Miller says this drawer holds nothing but a single species of spruce budworm, an infamous pest of eastern forests in North America. Staring closely, though, reveals shades of brown, from mahogany and chocolate to almost beige. And the wings are mottled with yet tinier variations on the theme.

These individual differences count as biodiversity too. Differences at the ecosystem, species and genetic levels all matter, Miller says.

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