Now here’s a great idea! Using Google maps to identify the location of news stories about snow leopards in China. Juan Li, a young Ph.D. student has created this Google map of snow leopards reported during the 20 year period of 1990-2009 by searching the Google News Archive.
She says” I am a Ph.D candidate of conservation biology, in Center for Nature and Society, Peking university. And my supervisor is Lu Zhi.
I did this map, just because I wanted to know more about snow leopard in China. And Google Alerts is a simple and easy way to collect the information. But Google Alerts did not provide the auto-link to the Google map. So I have to map the news manually. And I will keep this map updated.
I don’t mind you put it on your website, which is a really great website for snow leopard. Thank you. All the best wishes!”
Thanks to you Juan Li, this is a very clever idea and it’s good for researchers and people interested in snow leopard conservation in China that you’ve committed to updating it. We’ll publish it on a regular basis.
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One Response to “Snow leopards on news map in China”
Loss of biodiversity is never a good thing. There is evidence that suggests the the loss of a top predator from an area decreases even further in biodiversity than the loss of the one species, due to redistributing resources. With pumas removed from Yosemite it looks like large prey animals are free to eat the best food without worrying about hiding from potential predators (the puma that's no longer there), so they eat even more of it, and less of that resource is available for smaller animals. It appears that since the smaller animals have less of what they need, there are now fewer kinds of them. When an area has fewer kinds of organisms (less than normal biodiversity) this makes it easier to collapse the ecosystem, quickly by disease taking out the important species (some places have what is called a keystone species), or more slowly by removing them one at a time. This may not be what would happen in the Amur River Valley region, but it seems there is a possibility.
Amur leopards are genetically distinct from other leopards, which makes them a unique animal, and some would argue that that's enough to make it worth it.
One thing I think, though it isn't really a biological argument, is we messed up the world, we should work to fix it. This includes conserving beautiful animals like the Amur leopard, and it also includes conserving all the ugly, creepy or otherwise unpleasant (and ultimately necessary) plants and animals. Whether we can is a different story.