A Guide to New Jersey Biodiversity - Ella Stastney
My Writing
I love to share my knowledge of biodiversity with others, and I especially love doing research to further my knowledge. Below are some of my pieces of writing about biodiversity!
Biodiversity in Your Backyard! What It Is, and Why You Can Make a Difference
Click here to see it in the school newspaper, The Helix.
We often hear about preserving biodiversity as one of the main goals of the environmental movement, and sometimes that goal is simplified as stopping species loss and extinction. But why does it matter, and what can we all do to help?
Biodiversity is the existence and interrelationship between and among organisms that have been formed over millions of years to create the ecosystems we see on Earth today.
But why does it matter? The first critical contribution of biodiversity is “provisioning”—the foods we eat, the water we drink, the medicines we rely on. The second critical contribution is “regulating”—giving resilience to the things we need, whether it is resisting diseases through genetic diversity or an ecosystem’s ability to recover from disaster.
Last are the contributions biodiversity can make that we have not even yet imagined. Does the key to curing cancer exist in the venom of a tree snake in the Amazon we have never seen? How exactly does the sea cucumber liquefy itself to escape predators, then re-solidify itself after? And what other amazing abilities and compounds exist? If biodiversity continues to decline at its current rate, we may never know.
But like all seemingly huge, global, intractable problems, we wonder—what can one student living in New Jersey do? We cannot save the Amazon. We cannot reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone. How can we help in our own state?
You may be surprised to learn that although New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, it is also a highly biodiverse state. It exists at the intersection between the more northern and southern species, has 5 distinct ecosystems, and is the home to many species, some of which are nearly unique. And because so much of New Jersey’s land is privately held, a great deal of that biodiversity exists on private lands—including your backyard! Recently, for instance, the largest known population of bog turtles, the state reptile of New Jersey and an endangered species located predominantly here, was discovered on private land in our state. At least a few of those bog turtles are in my backyard right here in Marlboro (they like to walk up the driveway or even around our front porch after a heavy rain)!
So what can we do? First, the easy things—respect all the wildlife you see around your home. Just because something is in your backyard, or seems commonplace, does not mean it is unimportant. Every species plays a critical role in maintaining biodiversity, so do your best not to disrupt their environment.
Second, if you see something interesting or unique, report it. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has a reporting line for wildlife sightings— https://dep.nj.gov/njfw/conservation/reporting-rare-wildlife-sightings/—that anyone can use. You never know—the animal you see may be an endangered species, or making an exciting entry into a new area. And even if it is not, the better we understand these species, the better we can help them survive and thrive.
Biodiversity is the key to our healthy and happy existence. By all contributing in whatever way we can, we can help maintain the biodiversity that remains and even reverse losses. Next time you are out in your backyard, take a closer look; you never know how biodiverse it could be!
Towards AI in Biodiversity: Predicting the Unknown
Biodiversity is the existence and interrelationship between and among organisms that have been formed over millions of years to create the ecosystems we see on Earth today. There is general agreement that loss of biodiversity is a serious risk to our health, our resilience, and therefore our ability to live and thrive (learn more in my previous article “Biodiversity in Your Backyard! What It Is, and Why You Can Make a Difference”).
But while everyone agrees with that assessment in general, loss of biodiversity does not happen in general. It happens one species, in one ecosystem, at a time. And as science stands now, it is virtually impossible to assign a specific risk to any one species declining, or going extinct. This makes it incredibly difficult to generate public interest in any one species’ plight before it is too late. Thus, loss of biodiversity continues.
It is also virtually impossible to propose solutions or replacements for those species in any environment. We simply do not understand the incredibly complex interrelationships, and studying them through conventional means would be impossibly time consuming and expensive, and would almost certainly miss the opportunity to make a positive difference.
Enter A.I. Recently, the New York Times published a very interesting article detailing the contributions AI is beginning to make to biology, titled “A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive,” by Carl Zimmer. Using AI foundational models trained with great amounts of biological data, but without “naming” or defining the cells or organisms, the model has made some astonishing discoveries; it predicted in six weeks a kidney cell responsible for making a hormone to increase red blood cell production in low oxygen environments, a discovery which took scientists 134 years! (Zimmer). Furthermore, scientists are predicting many more insights from AI in this particular area.
Imagine applying that same AI-based approach to biodiversity? The data and characteristics of an ecosystem, including the characteristics of the known species of animals and plants, both remaining and extinct, could be programmed into an AI foundational model, and the model could go to work. It could suggest the existence of a plethora of species that haven’t yet been discovered, or those that have gone extinct before we discovered them! It could suggest the relationships among all the species, and what other aspects of the ecosystem might be affected if any species were lost. It could even suggest the characteristics of a species that would improve the ecosystem, filling a gap potentially caused by an earlier extinction.
Ultimately, this kind of AI-generated model of each and every ecosystem could help us truly measure and predict the risks of loss of biodiversity, clearly defining the stakes and issues. In my opinion, only once we have that will we be able to properly value and preserve the biodiversity we so dearly need.