DIVERSITAS - International Programme on Biodiversity

 

 

Diversitas is an international programme of biodiversity research for forwarding and accelerate knowledge on biodiversity, including its origin, composition, ecosystem function and maintenance.

 

DIVERSITAS' mission

The mission of Diversitas is to promote integrative scientific research on biodiversity, linking biological, ecological and social science disciplines in order to produce socially relevant knowledge and to offer the scientific basis for the maintenance and sustainable use of biodiversity.

Diversitas brings together biological, ecological and social sciences to edit four key questions that underlie our limited understanding of the current situation.

  • How did biodiversity develop in space and time to reach current state?
  • How much biodiversity exists and how does its change or loss refer to the system as a whole?
  • How does biodiversity correspond to the delivery of ecosystem functions and services, and what is the true value of these products?
  • How can scientific searching support policy and decision making to encourage more sustainable use of biodiversity?

 

DIVERSITAS' activities

Diversitas Core Projects contain a cycle of discovery, analysis and information sharing that supports the application of socially relevant knowledge.

  • bioGENESIS: Developing new strategies and tools for discovering and navigating biodiversity; researching the dynamic of diversification; assessing the evolutionary history of biotic assembly; predicting evolutionary responses to environmental perturbations.
  • bioDISCOVERY: Assessing current levels of biodiversity; developing the scientific basis for monitoring and observing; understanding and predicting changes.
  • ecoSERVICES: Expanding biodiversity and ecosystem functioning science to larger scales and over a greater breadth of the biological hierarchy; linking changes in ecosystem structure and functioning to changes in ecosystem services; assessing human response to change in ecosystem services.
  • bioSUSTAINABILITY: Developing new knowledge to guide policy and decision making that support sustainable use of biodiversity; evaluating the effectiveness of current conservation measures; studying the social, political and economic drivers of biodiversity loss, as well as social choice and decision making.


Diversitas’ other scientific projects include the exploration and explanation of the biological richness of the mountains of the world (GMBA), the formation of a framework for freshwater biodiversity assessment (freshwaterBIODIVERSITY), the assessment of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and the anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity change (agroBIODIVERSITY) and the cooperation on global level to make the world safe from the consequences of invasive alien species (GISP).

 

DIVERSITAS downloads

Contact

Anne Larigauderie
DIVERSITAS Secretariat
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN)
Rue Cuvier – CP 41
75231 Paris Cedex 05
France

Phone: +33 (0)1 40 79 80 40
Fax: +33 (0)1 40 79 80 45

Email: secretariat [at] diversitas-international.org
Web: http://www.diversitas-international.org/