Addressing biodiversity loss by building a shared future

The 22nd of May 2022 marked the twentieth anniversary of the United Nation’s International Day for Biological Diversity, which was instigated as an annual event in 2002, ten years after the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity. We therefore stand thirty years on from the formal recognition by the global community that the diversity of life on Earth is an asset that should be valued in its own right, and that humanity should endeavour to protect it.

PLOS Biology has been around for nearly twenty of those thirty years, publishing work that directly addresses questions of global biodiversity—how it arose, how it has changed in the past, how it is being affected by ongoing anthropogenic activity, and what we can do to protect it.

Strikingly, one of our most read and cited papers ever [1] was one that simply sought to establish how many species exist on the planet. The debate around this topic is ongoing; estimates of the total number of species vary by at least four orders of magnitude, and it has recently been suggested that massive diversity may lie underappreciated in the bacteria that live in and on the bodies of animals [2]. However, a paucity of data for many taxonomic groups hinders such census efforts. Considering that, even for some well-studied taxonomic groups, the current rates of extinction are unknown or seem to have been substantially underestimated [3, 4], global biodiversity is in jeopardy.

A cursory survey of biodiversity-related papers that have been published in the journal in the past year reveals several principal topics. In this issue alone, we feature work addressing the biodiversity of marine communities half a billion years apart [5, 6] and the use of artificial intelligence to automate the surveillance of threatened species [3].

Across the past year, one topic to emerge has been how biodiversity has changed in the past, with papers attempting to infer what forces, both biotic and abiotic, have driven these changes, often with the implicit or explicit expectation that we can learn lessons about future change. These papers include (in roughly temporal order) studies of ancient Ediacaran animal communities [5], end-Cretaceous sharks [7], Cenozoic snakes [8], and cold-water corals over the past 20,000 years [6] (Fig 1). A further paper leaves empiricism behind and presents a tool for using simulation to probe the drivers of biodiversity [9].